Many of us were relieved to learn that Roe v. Wade would no longer be in effect to justify killing babies, but the crusade was on to keep abortions alive by encouraging the use of the abortion pill—and the results have been deadly and disastrous.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) conducted a sophisticated study on mifepristone (the abortion pill) to determine the aftereffects of the drug:
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 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).
The EPPC has been explicit about its recommendations to protect women, including multiple in-person visits to the doctor; an explanation of the prescribing information and potential side effects; administration in-person; surgical intervention availability; notification to the FDA on serious adverse effects; and confirmation by a doctor regarding the baby’s gestational age.
These requirements were originally put in place to protect women—over time, however, these restrictions were removed, because making the process easier and more convenient was more important than protecting women: “During the Obama and Biden administrations, the FDA chipped away at these initial safeguards,” which included these three adjustments:
- a mifepristone abortion now requires as a little as one telehealth visit with any approved healthcare provider (not necessarily a physician),
- a woman may self-administer drugs obtained from a mail-order pharmacy, and
- the prescriber need not report any adverse events unless he or she knows that a patient has died.
Now, organizations have pushed back on the EPPC 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.
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 to political forces.
Image: VAlaSiurua, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons, unaltered.
