Dubious Estimates of Medication Abortion Harms
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary have repeatedly promised an FDA review of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion. They have referenced an April report from an anti-abortion group that claims to show a far higher rate of serious side effects from the drug than has been found previously.
But as Staff Writer Kate Yandell writes, reproductive health experts say that the report, by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is not peer-reviewed research. It didn’t disclose where it got its data and has substantial methodological issues, they say.
Mifepristone is used alongside misoprostol for medication abortion and is FDA-approved for terminating pregnancies through 10 weeks of gestation. Serious side effects from medication abortion are rare. Medication abortions make up most abortions in the U.S. — 63% of them in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports reproductive rights.
In a Sept. 19 letter to Republican state attorneys general, Kennedy and Makary said the report indicated “potential dangers that may attend offering mifepristone without sufficient medical support or supervision.”
EPPC’s report claimed that mifepristone came with a serious adverse event rate of 10.93%, substantially higher than the rate of less than 0.5% reported on the drug’s FDA label.
As Kate explains, 263 reproductive health researchers wrote in an Aug. 27 response that “the report does not provide reliable evidence to support this claim, nor does any published literature.”
“Decades of conclusive scientific evidence amassed through more than one hundred rigorous studies based on hundreds of thousands of patient outcomes have overwhelmingly established the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone for medication abortion and management of early pregnancy loss,” the reproductive health researchers wrote in their letter.
The letter’s lead signer, Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program, told Kate that the “largest issue” was that the EPPC report appeared to overcount emergency department visits as serious adverse events, even though it is known that people receiving medication abortions often visit the emergency department simply due to having questions about symptoms that turn out to be normal or wanting follow-up to see if they remain pregnant.
“Oftentimes, people will go to an ER when they don’t have another source of immediate care,” she said.
For more, see: “Trump Officials Cite Dubious Estimates of Medication Abortion Harms.”
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