An unprecedented study in the United States has found that abortion pills are 22x more dangerous than previously supposed or admitted to.
The groundbreaking study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center analysed data from insurance claims relating to 865,000 chemical abortions between 2017 and 2023, making it the largest study of complications reported by women post-abortion.
The study found that 10.93 per cent of these women experienced sepsis, infection, haemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
The US label on abortion pills applied by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) states that the adverse effect rate is “less than 0.5 percent”. This FDA claim was based on ten clinical trials with a much smaller sample size of just under 31,000 participants.
The new study found that the true rate could be as much as 22x more than claimed by the FDA.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center concluded that its “research shows unequivocally that mifepristone abortion, as currently practiced in the US is considerably more dangerous to women than is represented on the FDA-approved drug label…
“The FDA should further investigate the harm this drug causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether. Women deserve better than the abortion pill.”
In 2022, an American woman named Amber Thurman died after she developed acute severe sepsis brought on by taking the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol.
Abortion complications remain underreported in the UK, though Lord Moylan’s Complications from Abortions (Annual Report) Bill proposes to establish an annual report that would provide more comprehensive abortion risk data.
A one-off 2023 study found that post-abortion medical complications were much higher than official statistics had shown. By combining independent providers’ data with NHS follow-up data, the number of abortion complications – such as cervical tears and sepsis – trebled.
US academics whose research highlighted the risks of abortion pills are currently suing Sage Publications after it retracted their work following an alleged pro-abortion backlash.
The studies, which had passed the standard peer-review process and were published in the Sage journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology, were cited by a US district judge who suspended the FDA’s approval of mifepristone.
The ruling was later overturned, though one of the research papers found that visits to emergency rooms following chemical abortions had increased by over 500% between 2002 through 2015.
Sage says it based its retractions on the authors not disclosing their pro-life connections and that a subsequent appraisal found “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions”, a claim which the researchers strongly deny.
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