USA – Research on claims of “abortion pill reversal” stopped early

International Campaign for Women's Right to Safe Abortion
Dec 10, 2019
by Marge Berer

Amongst the seemingly endless anti-abortion efforts to destroy the provision of safe, legal abortion in the USA, has been an unproven claim that it is possible to reverse the abortifacient effects of mifepristone by taking progesterone. As the editor of this newsletter, I decided against reporting this up to now because the only “evidence” put forward (by a handful of anti-abortion doctors in the USA) was and has remained too thin to draw any conclusions from it, based literally on a handful of cases and without a control group. Unfortunately, the European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Health Care published the study in December 2017, giving it a veneer of scientific respectability that it did not deserve. Some anti-abortion politicians in the USA, who weren’t apparently concerned about the lack of evidence, put laws through the national legislatures of eight US states requiring doctors to offer “abortion pill reversal” to any woman who had taken mifepristone, but not yet taken the misoprostol 24 hours later (if she changed her mind). I wrote a comment criticising the article, which was published in April 2018: Response to “Progesterone for preventing pregnancy termination after initiation of medical abortion with mifepristone”: what’s the real point here? Eur J Contracept Reprod Health Care 2018 Apr;23 (2):169. The original article was not removed but “corrected”.

Continued: http://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/usa-research-on-claims-of-abortion-pill-reversal-stopped-early/