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Women Have Been Lied to About the Abortion Pill
Many of us were relieved to learn that Roe v. Wade would no longer be actively followed to justify killing babies. But the crusade was on to keep abortions alive by encouraging the use of the abortion pill. The results have been deadly and disastrous. A scientific and sophisticated effort was made to study the results of taking the abortion pill. To ensure their findings were comprehensive and legitimate, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) conducted a study of insurance company reports on mifepristone, the abortion pill:
The most comprehensive U.S. study of the abortion pill excluded tens of thousands of insurance claims from its analysis of mifepristone-linked complications to ensure it did not exaggerate the harms the abortion drug could inflict on women.
The exclusion of those data points further legitimizes findings that 10.9 percent of women suffered sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other serious complications within 45 days of a chemical abortion. It also puts to bed criticisms raised by bad-faith actors who questioned researchers’ conclusions that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration should reinstate mifepristone safeguards or potentially rescind its approval altogether.
The researchers, Ryan T. Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall, made a major effort to exclude incidents that could not be directly ascribed to the abortion pill:
Even with tens of thousands of data exclusions and an ER visit benchmark that nearly matched the abortion drug’s label, Anderson and Hall found the rate of life-threatening complications due to mifepristone is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and the abortion pill’s manufacturer suggest.
The EPPC emphasized that the mail-order approach to distributing the pill was putting women at risk:
Hall, the center’s director of data analysis, added that about half of the women who experience what’s called an ‘adverse event’ will likely end up in the ER or hospitalized overnight. ‘It’s very risky for her in these situations to be doing this without proper care from a physician throughout the process.’
The extra attention paid to this report could be due to its huge database of health insurance claims. It includes nearly 900,000 prescribed abortions from 2017 to 2023.
That’s a stark contrast to the FDA-approved label, which relies on data from about 31,000 claims and shows less than 0.5% severe reactions—compared to the nearly 11% reported by the EPPC.
The EPPC has been explicit about its recommendations to protect women, including multiple in-person visits to the doctor; explanation of the prescribing information and potential side effects; administered safely in a medical facility; surgical intervention availability; notification to the FDA on serious adverse effects; and confirmation by a doctor regarding the length of the pregnancy.
These requirements were originally put in place to protect women from adverse effects. Over time, however, these restrictions were removed:
During the Obama and Biden administrations, the FDA chipped away at these initial safeguards, risking women’s health in order to increase access to abortion. Under the current Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) in effect since 2023:
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a mifepristone abortion now requires as a little as one telehealth visit with any approved healthcare provider (not necessarily a physician),
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a woman may self-administer drugs obtained from a mail-order pharmacy, and
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the prescriber need not report any adverse events unless he or she knows that a patient has died.
Making the process easy and convenient for patients was more important than saving the lives of the women. The EPPC also took additional steps to ensure the legitimacy of their results:
We consider only serious adverse events that occurred within 45 days following the abortion. This is conservative, as some adverse events may present later (and studies relied on by the FDA used a timeframe as long as 72 days). Additionally, the likelihood of a subsequent pregnancy within this timeframe is negligible, which ensures that adverse events are related to the abortion rather than to a subsequent pregnancy.
A number of organizations have pushed back on the report in order to discredit the results. Here is one example:
The EPPC’s characterization of ‘serious adverse event’ raises further doubts about the study’s findings. The authors identified 167,855 of these events in total, but nearly nine in ten of them raise serious eyebrows.
For starters, they include 40,960 emergency room visits. Note, these are visits and not hospital admissions. While nobody ever wants to go to an ER, a visit is not technically a serious adverse event, according to the FDA. You can tell that the EPPC is being intentionally shifty here because they do list hospitalizations in their data.
Other organizations that are invested in killing babies have also tried to discredit the study:
‘It’s troubling that President Trump’s new FDA commissioner has refused to acknowledge mifepristone’s longstanding record of overwhelming safety and efficacy,’ Liz Wagner, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told HuffPost. ‘And it’s even more troubling that a deeply flawed, non-peer-reviewed ‘study’ was released by an anti-abortion group immediately after Dr. Makary told a reporter that the FDA may act on ‘a real signal’ on mifepristone.’
And the Planned Parenthood website continues to assure women that the pill is safe:
Serious problems can cause death in the most rare cases, but abortion is typically very safe. In fact, pregnancy and childbirth is riskier than most abortions.
If you have complications during your medication abortion, you may have to go back to the doctor’s office or health center. In the unlikely event that you are still pregnant, your doctor or nurse will discuss your options with you. You may need another dose of medicine or to have an in-clinic abortion to end the pregnancy.
Meanwhile, Marty Makary dithers on the results of the study:
‘I have no plans to take action against mifepristone,’ said FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. During that same interview, Makary admitted new data is coming that he hasn’t studied.
Dr. Makary has always struck me as a conscientious and ethical doctor. Let’s hope he takes action sooner rather than later, and doesn’t cave in to political forces.
[Originally published in American Thinker]
Published in Healthcare
Great post, Susan – thank you for bringing this to everyone’s attention. Ryan T. Anderson does great work. I posted this tweet in the Ricochet Catholic Group some days ago. I hope our Catholic VP can bring some better influence to this issue.
If an unmarried woman is pregnant, that isn’t the first time she was lied to.
In my recent career as a reproductive endocrinologist I dealt with spontaneous pregnancy loss every couple of weeks. I tried using misoprostol with mifepristone as recommended, I even had the doses taped on my computer. Gave up after six months or so as more than half of the women had complications, mostly severe bleeding requiring an urgent office procedure, or severe and unremitting pain. Better to do a quick office extraction than to use the pills.
There’s no way these pills should be legal without an office visit, a dating ultrasound (use earlier in pregnancy has fewer complications), informed consent and a backup plan for bleeding or pain. I question if they should be FDA approved at all. I would vote against it were I on the advisory panel.
Excellent points, Dr R. I appreciate your experience and input.
Politics, it seems, has overridden the precautionary principle (first, do no harm) in the case of this drug. Extremely sad.
Politics, it seems, has overridden the precautionary principle (first, do no harm) in the case of this drug. Extremely sad.
Women weren’t told the facts about surgical abortion either.
Sad but true.
I doubt that there is any way to stop this, at least none that I can think of.
Due to the insanity of the local medical system, I order a lot of meds from overseas pharmacies. I love it. It means I no longer have to shell out monies for an ER visit if I get a tick bite with a huge bull’s eye on it. I simply go to my medicine chest and get out the packet of doxycycline and another of prednisone which I now always have on hand.
What this indicates is that even if it is made illegal for pharmacies to handle dispensing the morning after meds in the USA, the only way to stop the practice of using the abortificant would be to slow down or ban incoming mail from foreign nations.
The other factor is that according to what is going on, the numbers of miscarriages is steadily rising because of the mRNA vaxxes. Same with still births. The overall fertility of Americans has fallen drastically since the Dec 2020 introduction of the mRNA vaccines. So whether or not the morning after pill will be legally banned or not, the need for women to even have to think about having to decide if they want to continue a pregnancy or not is going to be a greatly diminished need.
Even if the mRNA vaccines are discontinued tomorrow, we currently have a whole generation of babies, children, teens and young adults who may never be able to conceive.
Where is this an issue?
All of this also makes me wonder again/more about the people – including some on Ricochet – who basically advocate “giving out Plan B like candy.”
I’ve not seen them on Ricochet .
I think Henry (Castaigne) and Rufus have both so advocated. Could be others too, but less frequently to notice.
If the site search worked on comments too, it would be easy to find.
So what? It’s birth control.
With lots and lots of known side-effects, etc.
Go on.
The abortion pill looks really stupid now, but the morning after pill isn’t a big deal.
Just to add appalling anecdote to the data: Women can get chemical abortifacients and take them without medical oversight. That means that the question
“how pregnant are you?” is answered by the unwillingly pregnant woman herself, with all the inevitable inaccuracy, innumeracy, wishful thinking, denial and so on.
This is why I know—with some intimacy—about three separate incidents in which police officers responded to a situation in which a woman has delivered a dead, 16-20 week fetus. The women are sent off to the hospital to be assessed and treated.
But what should be done with the fetus? It’s dead, so the paramedics don’t transport it. It’s not a “person,” so a funeral home won’t come for it. The police officer has to leave it—that is, him or her– where it is, for the woman herself to deal with when she gets home from the hospital. The police officer tells his chaplain about this. He has nightmares.
Someone called it “a chemical coathanger.” It seems apt.
It appears to me that generally Plan A is to rely on Plan B, if there is any plan at all.
And I offer this challenge to anyone who supports abortion of any kind: State a Bright Line, post conception, that you can defend, for the beginning of human life.
The government can’t make anybody take care of a fetus. The mother can eat Doritos and beer and worse. Once you get into the third trimester, if the mother is anxious or angry about it, the kid can get adaptation issues which are a real bitch to fix with a psychologist.
I think the abortion pill is nuts the way they are doing it right now, but I wish the right would just stay out of it beyond that. It would be so much more realistic and politically positive if we would just drop it beyond the abortion pill.
(right out of the gate 4% of the women taking the abortion pill ended up going to the emergency room)
This:
And this:
Agree. As someone who has used birth control and who also has had a “spontaneous abortion,” also known as a miscarriage, I can confirm only one of those two caused me to be hospitalized and disrupted my body enough that I was advised to not get pregnant again for many months. And then there was the embarrassment of being a bloody mess, literally, when I arrived in the base ER. I can’t imagine an over-the-counter creation that does the same without complications or a doctor’s supervision.
The psychological depression of losing a baby and of seeing “spontaneous abortion” (the medical term for a miscarriage) posted on the nurses’ station board by my bed number added to my misery because ”abortion” was linked to the deliberate act of killing an innocent baby. I went through the stage where one blames oneself believing the miscarriage was my fault because I had done something wrong. (A friend helped me understand and cope with what happened by telling me simply, “You did nothing wrong. You just laid a bad egg.”) I could finally mentally cope with that but don’t know how a woman copes with deliberately killing her baby. I still harbored fears for two years until I delivered a healthy second daughter.
Where is what specifically an issue?
The abortificant approach to pregnancy is on going and it means that half the abortions in the USA are the result of a woman using a mifepristone-based drug.
The drug has dangers. The women taking the drug do not realize this. Some 20 years ago, I remember a devastated father writing in a major publication about how painful losing his daughter to this drug happened to be.
The people responsible for making this drug available here in the USA in the early 1990’s were dedicated to the idea that abortion was an individual woman’s right. They managed to replicate the drug that had been freely available in other countries by doing intense research that they decided to call “cancer research” so that pro-life groups did not shut them down. Some of them did not think this drug would bring about massive profits. But it did.
One article discussing these matters is here:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/01/abortion-pill-mifepristone-mifeprex-roe-dobbs-private-equity/
People have the need to continue to focus on this drug, and the lack of sufficient safety warnings, with help from orgs that publish articles like this one:
https://lozierinstitute.org/overlooked-dangers-of-mifepristone-the-fdas-reduced-rems-and-self-managed-abortion-policies-unwanted-abortions-unnecessary-abortions-unsafe-abortions/
But even as we focus on this point, the coming reality is that we are entering an era of extremely diminished fertility. We see a two percent decline in live births here in the USA just between 2022 and 2023. Although pro-life activists are right to focus in all matters relating to abortion, they may be missing the near future’s biggest threat to both fetal life and that of newborns: the COV mRNA vaxxes.
And the COV vaxxes are the precursor to the coming era of all mRNA vaxxes for everything from the common cold to cancer. Trump himself has been touting that technology. (Witness his recent boost for Stargate project.)
From the CDC:
“The provisional number of
births for the United States in 2023 was
3,591,328, down 2% from 2022. The
general fertility rate was 54.4 births per
1,000 females ages 15–44, down 3%
from 2022. The total fertility rate was
1,616.5 births per 1,000 women in 2023,
a decline of 2% from 2022. Birth rates
declined for females in age groups 15–19
through 35–39 and were unchanged for
females ages 10–14 and for women ages
40–44 and 45–49 in 2023. The birth
rate for teenagers ages 15–19 declined
by 3% in 2023 to 13.2 births per 1,000
females; the rate for younger teenagers
(ages 15–17) was unchanged, and the
rate for older teenagers (ages 18–19)
declined 3%. The cesarean delivery rate
rose to 32.4% in 2023, from 32.1 in 2022;
the low-risk cesarean delivery rate also
increased to 26.6% from 26.3%. The
preterm birth rate was 10.41% in 2023,
essentially unchanged from the rate of
10.38% in 2022.”
Source document:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr035.pdf
Thank you.
One might tender the idea that the intent is to kill not just babies, but their mothers as well, hence, 2 for 1 culling of the population. It is getting harder and harder to not believe that the Left is deliberately trying to diminish the human population (to save the planet, of course). Every single policy they pursue seems to have that effect. When do we conclude that it is intentional, not just collateral damage from their efforts to “provide” for the citizenry? Why else would they lie so blatantly?
They aren’t outlawing the Plan B pill.
If 4% of the people that take the abortion pill have to go to the emergency room, something is really wrong. It’s also really gross.
Many of the policies that the Left pursues have also been enhanced by some of the people on the Right.
For far too long we have had Rockefeller-directed medicine approaches be the “my way or the highway” approach.
By the end of the Sixties, the birth control pill had become one of the most prescribed drugs on the market. It was touted at the time by both physicians who voted for Dems and by physicians who voted “R”.
As time went on, in order to make the pill remain appealing to women, the dosage of chemical hormones in the pill were weakened. This meant more unintended pregnancies.
Often young women were not even told about this major change to a medical situation that their own moms had engaged in. Although their moms had been exposed to more harms from the pill than the newer generations would, the pill in the 1960’s through to whatever year the switch was made was more effective at preventing pregnancies.
Often as a young woman was being offered a Rx for the pill, the prescribing doctor did not bother to mention alternate methods of intervening in conception. Or if the alt methods were offered, they were explained away as being pointlessly ineffective.
It is not surprising that in this climate, the idea has been established that the best way to prevent a pregnancy is to go with the latest prescription drug available, the morning after pill.
The info that Susan Quinn is providing is important and would be included in any honest doctor/patient conference. In fact it is part of a guiding medical principle: “informed consent.” I am curious as to how many ob/gyn doctors discuss this drug at all. Or how many discuss it only as an option, rather than pointing out its risks.
“The poison was never forced — it was offered gently, until you forgot it was poison at all.” – Mark Twain