Dead Cat with Kiki Freedman

Eric Newcomer36min

Tom Dotan

00:05

Welcome everybody, it's your dead cat for the week. It's Tom dotun. Here joined by Eric newcomer, and Katie Benner. And our special guest this week is Kiki Friedman. Kiki is the CEO of hay Jane, which is a startup that provides abortion pills by mail. So obviously very topical, and very much a company that is offering something that will be very much more in need to many people in the coming months and years ahead. So first of all, Kiki, thank you for joining us.

Kiki Freedman

00:43

Thank you guys for having me.

Tom Dotan

00:45

So before we get into all of the reasons that your company is fascinating, and to many people vital, I think we should just give a better explanation of what exactly Hey, Jane does, what sort of person it is helping and trying to reach? Yeah, let's just let's just start there.

Kiki Freedman

01:03

Great. So we are a digital clinic for abortion access, I think the first place to start is how do we do that, and it's through the abortion pill, a leap one in five people right out of nowhere with the worst and believe it is. So I could give a quick overview of that. It's a set of medications that have been approved by the FDA since 2000. So I've been around a while, super, super safe, they actually have a lower adverse reaction rate than Tylenol, and very effective in that 98%. They're approved for use up to 11 weeks in the US, which is more than 90% of abortions. And so, you know, most patients will be eligible for them. The way he works is that folks can go online, and fill out a really easy sort of medical history consults, and then have a prescription confirmed by a licensed clinician, usually within 24 hours, the medications will then be mailed to their home. And we'll have lots of information on how to take them. And what's I think most unique about hygiene is throughout they'll have access to on demand, emotional support and online community. Should they want it to be able to connect with others going through the same thing at the same time,

Eric Newcomer

02:10

is the ability to prescribe this through telemedicine new is that, you know, we had an episode about, you know, the ADHD medication. So I'm just wondering is, is this also possible because of telemedicine rules or as has been the case?

Kiki Freedman

02:25

That's a great question. So prior to COVID, it was sort of legally ambiguous whether or not the medications could be dispensed via the mail. It basically they had just been given in clinics, doctors, offices, hospitals, but there had been already some strong momentum and research and policymaking towards allowing, you know, easier forms of access to align with the safety. So there was a great study called the tele abortion study done pre COVID. And then at the beginning of COVID, the UK actually launched a large scale offering of abortion pills by mail. And the FDA did finally make it permanently legal just last December,

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