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:

1. a mifepristone abortion now requires as a little as one telehealth visit with any approved healthcare provider (not necessarily a physician),

2. a woman may self-administer drugs obtained from a mail-order pharmacy, and

3. 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]