The abortion industry ignores scientific evidence and opposes giving women the choice to reverse chemical abortions.
The abortion industry ignores scientific evidence and opposes giving women the choice to reverse chemical abortions.
P ro-life doctors are rallying around a new effort in the medical community: a treatment protocol that can reverse the effects of a chemical abortion before a pregnant mother loses her unborn child. Instead of helping to give women that choice, the abortion industry has come down hard against the new method, opposing legislation that would inform women of their options.
About one-third of annual abortions in the U.S. are chemical abortions, the most common type of abortion procedure in the first trimester, approved by the Food and Drug Administration for up to ten weeks’ gestation.
A chemical abortion takes place in two stages. First, a pregnant mother is given mifepristone — brand-name Mifeprex — which blocks progesterone, an essential hormone in the growth, development, and sustaining of a fetus. Twenty-four to 48 hours later, she takes a second drug, misoprostol, containing prostaglandins that induce cramping and bleeding to expel the fetus.
A little more than a decade ago, doctors began to develop a safe, successful way to halt that process, aimed at helping women who had taken Mifeprex to reverse the process of terminating their pregnancy before they took misoprostol.
Leaders in the abortion industry tend to deny that women ever come to regret abortion, a claim easily disproven by anecdotal evidence and scientific studies. Nevertheless, supporters of legal abortion insist that abortion-pill reversal (APR) is unnecessary because no woman would elect to undo a chemical abortion once she’s taken the first dose.
But according to Dr. Christina Francis, chairman of the board of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), more than 2,000 women have chosen APR and successfully halted a chemical abortion.
Francis says that she assisted one patient who had started a chemical abortion and later delivered a healthy son after choosing APR treatment. “She said that as soon as she took the abortion drug, she immediately regretted it, and she went home and Googled, ‘Can I reverse my abortion?’” Francis tells National Review.
That Google search eventually led her to Francis, one of the many providers willing to treat women who are determined to halt their partially completed chemical abortions. Women looking to reach those doctors can call a hotline number where a trained nurse will screen them and direct them to a local practitioner for treatment.
The mechanism of abortion-pill reversal is simple and scientifically sound. It can be attempted only for women who have taken Mifeprex, the first of the two chemical-abortion drugs, and not the second drug, misoprostol, and it must be started within 72 hours of taking Mifeprex. The method entails prescribing women a sustained regimen of progesterone, which competes in the body with Mifeprex and, ideally, prevents the abortion drug from cutting off nutrition and support to the fetus.
In the largest case series studying the effects of APR, women who received treatment and successfully reversed an attempted abortion had no increased risk of complications or birth defects. Close to 70 percent of the 754 women studied were able to undo the effects of Mifeprex and carry healthy babies to term.
As Francis puts it, there’s no medical reason this regimen shouldn’t work, as its mechanism is “consistent with basic chemistry.” In fact, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has affirmed that progesterone is proven safe in pregnancy, and even the development trials for Mifeprex suggest that progesterone would work in this way; in animals studied during the trial, high doses of progesterone showed the ability to prevent the abortion drug from taking effect.
Because of the promise this method has shown, pro-life legislators want to require abortion providers to inform women seeking a chemical abortion that APR is an option, as long as they have taken only Mifeprex. Under this legislation, women would remain free to choose chemical abortion, but would be equipped with the knowledge to give informed consent and have access to care if they change their mind.
“Part of informed consent is talking about risks, benefits, and alternatives. That’s basic,” Francis adds. “We learn that at the beginning of our medical training.” Important to note, too, is that women who regret abortion are at a higher risk for a variety of mental-health disorders.
Unsurprisingly, the abortion industry opposes these proposals, and several states are tied up in court defending against lawsuits from abortion-activist groups. Abortion supporters claim, contrary to the evidence, that APR is harmful to pregnant women, when in fact doctors routinely prescribe progesterone to pregnant women who have a risk of preterm birth or with a history of recurrent miscarriage.
Testifying against the legislation, abortionists argue that APR is risky for women because it isn’t approved by the FDA and amounts to experimenting on women — even as they sue the FDA to remove safety protocols for the chemical-abortion drugs. But as Francis points out, using a safe medication in cases when it isn’t explicitly FDA approved is common medical practice among obstetricians. For instance, the drug misoprostol is FDA approved only to treat gastric ulcers and to induce early abortion, but it is frequently used to induce labor in a non-abortion context.
Using progesterone to halt a chemical abortion has not been shown to have any safety risks. In fact, the chief study that abortion supporters cite to argue that APR is unsafe demonstrates the opposite — that Mifeprex carries significant risks to the pregnant woman, and APR treatment appears to do nothing but help.
The study itself involved several obvious conflicts of interest among its authors: Laura Davis, an employee of Planned Parenthood; Rachel Steward, an employee at a California chain of abortion clinics; and Dr. Mitchell Creinin, an OB-GYN and consultant for Danco Laboratories, the company that produces Mifeprex.
Meanwhile, it enrolled just twelve women, two of whom dropped out after experiencing side effects of Mifeprex, leaving only ten subjects, too few to provide any real insight into how APR might work on a wide scale. What’s more, the findings demonstrate the opposite of what abortion advocates claim. In the group that received APR treatment after Mifeprex, four out of five had ongoing pregnancies; in the placebo group, just two of five had ongoing pregnancies.
The authors report that they stopped the study early for “safety” reasons, making it sound as though APR were too unsafe to continue analyzing its effectiveness. In fact, the study was halted because women experienced complications from Mifeprex, and the side effects were far more severe in the women who had not received APR.
One woman in the APR treatment group went to the emergency room with bleeding because her chemical abortion was proceeding, but she required no further treatment. In the placebo group, two women went to the emergency room for hemorrhage, both needed surgical abortions, and one required subsequent blood transfusions. In other words, the study proved the opposite of what its authors assert.
Regardless, this is the single data point that the abortion industry relies on when opposing APR, referring to the treatment method as an “insidious and fictional concept” that has been “proven dangerous.” Such a description, from a medical director for Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, blatantly contradicts scientific evidence.
When supporters of legal abortion oppose pro-life legislation, one of their most common refrains is that abortion decisions should be left to women and their doctors and that abortion regulations fail to trust medical professionals. But in the case of APR, the abortion industry shows no such deference to doctors’ judgment and no interest in allowing women to choose anything other than abortion.
To inform women about the possibility of reversing a chemical abortion poses a distinct problem for professionals who provide abortions. It would require them to acknowledge that at least some women might regret choosing abortion and to admit, at least tacitly, that the unborn child is a human being. Acknowledging those realities would risk some portion of women choosing not to go through with the abortion in the first place, and it would expose once again the reality of abortion as a procedure that ends a human life.