New Study Shows Massive Harms from Abortion Pills

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D.

WASHINGTON D.C., May 2 (C-Fam) New data reveals that women suffer serious adverse effects following chemical abortions, at least 22 times more frequently than what is claimed on the label for the abortion drug mifepristone.

A new publication by Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan T. Anderson of the Ethics and Public Policy Center examines a database of U.S. insurance claims from 2017 to 2023 that includes over 865,000 cases where abortion pills were prescribed.  Almost eleven percent of women experienced serious complications including infections and severe bleeding after taking mifepristone.  The authors called on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to reevaluate the drug’s safety and potentially reconsider its approval.

“This is based on real world data,” said Anderson in an interview about the report. “This isn’t based on idealized clinical studies where the drug is administered perfectly.  This is how it’s really administered in the real world.”

According to the drug’s label, clinical trials found that serious complications only happened in 0.5 percent of cases. That figure has been widely used by abortion activists to argue for easier access to the drug, including by telemedicine.

During the Obama and Biden administrations, many of the safeguards that had existed to protect women, such as requiring an in-person consultation with a doctor prior to obtaining mifepristone, were rolled back.

The actual complications from mifepristone may even be worse than the study reports.  Because of a Supreme Court ruling in 2022 returning abortion to the states, some women seeking abortions where it is illegal have turned to clandestine methods of obtaining the drugs, such as buying them from overseas sellers.  Women who obtained mifepristone without a prescription and from providers operating without FDA oversight are not included in this dataset.  Furthermore, sellers of illegal abortion drugs often counsel women to conceal having taken them if they need medical care in case of complications.

Also absent from the insurance claims data are cases that end in the woman’s death, which the report’s authors intend to address in a forthcoming publication.

The implications of this study extend beyond the U.S. context.  Since 2019, Mifepristone has been included in the World Health Organization’s “core” essential medicines list of “the most efficacious, safe and cost-effective medicines for priority conditions.”  The 2019 update to the list also removed a previous stipulation that the abortion pill required “close medical supervision.”  In justifying this change, the WHO’s report cited the same incomplete and misleading clinical trial data: severe complications in less than half a percent of cases.

The new U.S.-based study by Hall and Anderson included women experiencing severe complications in one of the world’s wealthiest countries, where hospitals, clinics, and expert providers are relatively plentiful.  This is not the case in many poorer, developing countries where women suffer much higher rates of death in pregnancy and childbirth, often due to the same causes: bleeding and infections.

In response to recent challenges to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, abortion proponents like the Guttmacher Institute have argued that the drug “has been deemed critical to public health by WHO and other global health experts and that has been approved for use in countries around the world.”  By the same token, a reevaluation of the dangers of mifepristone undertaken by the FDA could impact its acceptability in other countries where women are currently suffering underestimated complications.

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