How dumping patients and pushing a lie misled everyone about the abortion pill

Decades of deception deliberately perpetuated by the abortion industry have given women a false sense of security about the alleged safety of the abortion pill (mifepristone).

The abortion industry has attempted to downplay the abortion pill’s risks to women for a very long time, but has in recent years taken to accusing women of ‘overreacting’ when they visit emergency rooms (ER) for adverse events resulting from the abortion pill.

If significant numbers of women are visiting ERs due to legitimate concerns about their abortion pill complications, who is at fault?

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• Decades ago, the abortion industry began encouraging women to lie about their abortion pill complications when visiting the ER.
• This protected the drug instead of the women themselves, and led to the rollback of safeguards surrounding the drug.
• This deception, in turn, has misled other women — and the rest of the public — about the drug’s actual risks.
• Abortion pill prescribers offload their patients to ERs, encouraging women to lie if injured – neither prescribers nor ER personnel learn the truth about the adverse events – no one reports those adverse events to the manufacturer – the manufacturer never learns of the adverse events to report to FDA – the FDA stays in the dark about true complications, impacting safeguards.

THE DETAILS:

As previously noted by Live Action News, “the FDA’s medication guide acknowledges that as many as seven percent (7%) of women will need surgery after taking mifepristone ‘to stop bleeding’ or to complete the abortion. In 2023 alone, that would potentially be between 13,000 and 45,000 women.”

In addition, the abortion pill’s (mifepristone 200mg) “2023 label… states that 2.9 to 4.6 percent of women who take abortion drugs end up in the emergency room. In 2023 alone, this would be potentially between about 19,000 (18,638) and 30,000 (29,564) women.”

These are not small numbers.

And yet, abortion industry insiders have suggested that women are only visiting ERs after taking the abortion pill because…

• they live far away from non-emergency medical help.
• they just want “to ask questions.”
• they are uncertain about the amount of bleeding they are experiencing.
• they want to ensure their chemical abortion is complete.

REALITY CHECK:

If the abortion industry is acknowledging these abortion pill complications are resulting in ER visits, and 40,000 women are going to the ER for (as they claim) very minimal reasons, this is an indictment on the industry itself.

It is an indictment on the fact that prescribers who receive money from their abortion pill clients are now just ‘patient dumping’ them at the ER. They are telling women in advance to go to the ER if experiencing abortion pill complications and lie to medical personnel, claiming they are experiencing a natural miscarriage.

This is, essentially, abandoning the patient.

This isn’t providing continuity of care; it is simply pushing pills.

Under the FDA’s Risk Evaluation and Mitigation System (REMS), prescribers are required to be able to handle a surgical or a second abortion or refer to someone who can — and abortion pill manufacturer Danco is not policing this properly.

The advent of mail-order abortions and the removal of in-person requirements have contributed to this negligence.

A recent analysis published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center examined a large pool of insurance data and stated that the abortion pill’s serious adverse events rate is 22 times higher than the FDA’s currently listed rate for the drug — with nearly 11% of women suffering such complications. A recent, smaller study from Ireland found nearly the same result, with 12% of women visiting the emergency room for complications.

THE BACKSTORY:

The late Sue Thayer (a Planned Parenthood manager who became pro-life), said that even prior to the time she left Planned Parenthood in 2008, Planned Parenthood was already telling women to go to the ER and lie about the fact that they took the abortion pill, testifying:

We were told to tell women who experienced complications at home to report to the ER and just say they were having a miscarriage. This avoided attention from the local medical community when we would be outsourcing complications to others.

New Mexico abortionist Franz Theard can also be heard in a VICE News video telling a patient, “If you have to go to the hospital for any reason, you don’t have to admit that you had the abortion pill; you can say, ‘I’m having a miscarriage.’”

Why is this significant?

Because it was 2016 by the time the Obama Administration FDA removed the requirement that mifepristone’s adverse events be reported to the FDA (except for deaths).

So Planned Parenthood’s premeditative decision (nearly a decade prior) to tell women to go to the ER and lie was already ensuring a decrease in these adverse events being reported to Planned Parenthood, which was responsible for informing the prescriber of adverse events, and the prescriber was then responsible for informing the manufacturer (Danco) of these adverse events — and the manufacturer was then required to inform the FDA of those adverse events.

Planned Parenthood essentially told women to lie so the abortion pill’s true complications would never be reported to anyone — which likely made the abortion pill’s adverse events look much more rare than they actually were.

This has allowed the industry to fraudulently tout the pill’s supposed ‘safety’.

If women place the blame for complications on natural miscarriage, then pregnancy and natural miscarriage complications are being inflated. As this has been happening for 20 years, it could potentially be driving up the pregnancy costs to women.

THE BOTTOM LINE:

For nearly a decade prior to the FDA’s removal of the abortion pill’s adverse event reporting requirements, the abortion industry had been abandoning its abortion pill patients to emergency rooms and encouraging women not to disclose they had taken these drugs, so that those complications were never reported as such.

This deception led to the lifting of safeguards surrounding the abortion pill, and is now causing more women to be put at risk of complications — all while they are told the drug is safe.

[Editor’s note: This story originally was published by Live Action News.]