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An explosive new report challenges official data, showing that real-world use of the abortion drug mifepristone leads to serious complications in more than 10% of cases.

Editor’s Note: In Australia, mifepristone is marketed as MS-2 Step (in combination with misoprostol), and is the most widely used abortion drug in the nation, especially via telehealth. Australian taxpayers subsidise it through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

An explosive new study is revealing that the abortion drug is significantly more dangerous than government health agencies have previously claimed. The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published a report Monday detailing the dangers associated with the use of the abortion drug mifepristone. The study found that, although the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) claims that less than half a percent of women experience serious complications, the actual rate of damage done by the drug is significantly higher.

Touted as the “largest-known study of the abortion pill,” the EPPC report examined data from an insurance database, covering 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions committed between 2017 and 2023. Here are some of the study’s most important findings.

More than 1 in 10 Women Experience Complications from Mifepristone

According to the EPPC’s report, 10.93% of women who used the abortion drug mifepristone experienced serious complications within 45 days as a result. Complications included sepsis (0.10% of cases), infection (1.34%), transfusion (0.15%), hemorrhage (3.31%), abortion-related hospitalisation (0.66%), abortion-related emergency room visit (4.73%), ectopic pregnancy (0.35%), unspecified other abortion-specific complications (5.68%), and other life-threatening adverse events (0.22%), including cardiac and pulmonary events, thrombosis, anaphylaxis, and the necessity of surgery. In nearly 3% of instances, use of mifepristone to commit abortion was followed by surgical abortion because the drug failed.

EPPC’s report noted, “Simply stated, mifepristone, as used in real-world conditions, is not ‘safe and effective.’”

The FDA’s Research on Mifepristone Is Inadequate

The EPPC’s report finds that complications arising from mifepristone are at least 22 times more common than the 0.5% of cases touted by the FDA. The new report is, according to EPPC, “the most comprehensive study of chemical abortion safety ever conducted in the US.” It relies on data collected from 28 times more mifepristone abortions than the FDA’s research does and, further, is more recent and more accurate to real-world circumstances. The EPPC noted that the FDA relies “entirely on data from more than a decade ago” from “a prescreened group of generally healthy women recruited into various clinical trials conducted at different times around the world.”

The cases examined by the organisation “are broadly representative of the women who obtain mifepristone abortions in the US” and “receive (or fail to receive) pre- and post-abortion healthcare of the real-world quality that prevails in the America today, not the carefully controlled regimen of care that ordinarily prevails in a clinical trial.”

The FDA Needs to Revise Its Standards for Mifepristone Prescription

Given the results of the report, the EPPC made several recommendations for the FDA to revise its policy regarding the prescription and use of mifepristone and “reinstate the original patient safety protocols that were required when mifepristone was first approved” in 2000. At that time, prerequisites for a mifepristone prescription included three in-person physician visits, the drug could only be prescribed by a physician, could only be dispensed in a physician’s office, and had to be taken in a physician’s office. There were also requirements for a follow-up physician visit and for adverse event reporting.

In 2016, under then-President Barack Obama, the safeguards were weakened, allowing for the drug to be prescribed up to 10 weeks instead of seven, removing the requirement for a physician to be the one prescribing the drug and eliminating the mandate that the manufacturer report any adverse events to the FDA other than death. The in-person dispensing requirement in the physician’s office, however, remained intact. In 2021, the Biden administration watered down the safeguards even further by eliminating the in-person visit requirement and the requirement for the drug to be dispensed in the physician’s office.

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Republished with thanks to The Washington Stand. Image courtesy of Unsplash.