Women who go to the emergency room with complications from medical abortions are likely to have their diagnoses miscoded as natural miscarriages, a new study found, creating a misleading picture of the safety and efficacy of abortion drugs now at the center of ongoing litigation.
Emergency room visits after abortion-drug use were 79 percent more likely to be miscoded as natural miscarriages compared with those following surgical abortions, according to a new study published by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. From 2016 to 2021, almost 84 percent of medical-abortion-related emergency room visits were miscoded, according to the study. Additionally, the study found that diagnoses in miscoded visits were 50 percent more likely to be labeled highly severe than those in correctly coded visits.
Widespread hospital miscoding adds to a growing list of safety concerns driving the legal battle around abortion drug safety and regulation.
“As a board-certified OB-GYN practicing in Texas, I’ve seen firsthand the devastating effects abortion drugs have on women, as I have been called to care for them in the ER regularly,” co-author of the study and medical doctor Ingrid Skop told National Review. “This study exposes the abortion industry’s reckless advice for women to hide their abortion drug use from doctors, delaying proper care and risking their health.”
The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration Marty Makary has promised a full agency review of the safety of mifepristone following a separate study from the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center that cast doubt on the safety of the drug, National Review previously reported. The EPPC study found almost 11 percent of women experienced serious adverse effects within 45 days of taking the drug, 22 times higher than the abortion drug’s current label indicates.
“When abortion-related emergencies are disguised as miscarriages, it impairs a doctor’s ability to make informed, evidence-based decisions,” James Studnicki, vice president and director of data analytics at Lozier, said in a statement. “That isn’t just a documentation error — it’s a public health crisis.”
Induced abortion via mifepristone and misoprostol (medical abortion) represented 63 percent of abortions in the United States in 2023, according to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute.
The think tank’s study is based on an analysis of Medicaid claims for almost 29,000 emergency room visits within 30 days of a surgical or medical abortion from 2004 to 2015 and from 2016 to 2021. Researchers determined if each visit was abortion-related and if it was accurately coded.
Though it is impossible to tell from data if patients deliberately concealed their use of abortion medication in these cases, Planned Parenthood provides guidance for women who do not want to reveal recent use of abortion drugs to doctors.
“Doctors are disadvantaged when they are unaware of a patient’s abortion history,” Skop said. “They may need to intervene more quickly to remove retained pregnancy tissue and/or the dead baby to prevent serious infection when abortion drugs fail. No other area of medicine tolerates such dangerous misinformation — it’s a direct threat to women’s safety.”
The Supreme Court last year rejected a challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, ruling that the pro-life doctors who brought the case lacked standing. Now, abortion providers are suing in federal court to get the FDA to lift restrictions around the prescription of mifepristone.