“We’re Creating Miscarriages With Medicine”: Abortion Lessons From Sweden

In Sweden, abortion pills are used to terminate pregnancies through 22 weeks gestation, compared to just 10 weeks in the United States.

Cecilia Nowell
July 16, 2025

Leaning across the midwife’s desk, Lena (not her real name) explains that she isn’t sure whether she wants to continue her pregnancy. At 36, she feels this is the moment when she must decide if she’d like her 5-year-old son to have any siblings. Her husband is desperate for more children, and everyone in her hometown, the Arctic village of Kiruna, Sweden, expects mothers to have multiple children.

“You can’t say you’d be happy with one in Kiruna,” she says. Everyone’s always asking, “When are you going to have siblings?”

Continued: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/medication-abortion-sweden/

The Father of the Abortion Pill

The 96-year-old scientist who came up with an idea for an “unpregnancy pill” decades ago has led an eventful life, from his teenage days in the French Resistance to his friendships with famous artists.

By Pam Belluck
Jan. 17, 2023

When the idea struck him, nearly 50 years ago, Dr. Étienne-Émile Baulieu believed it could be revolutionary. Creating a pill that could abort a pregnancy would transform reproductive health care, he thought, allowing women to avoid surgery, act earlier and carry out their decisions in private.

“When science meets women’s cause, it is irresistible,” Dr. Baulieu, 96, a French endocrinologist and biochemist often called the father of the abortion pill, said on a recent Sunday afternoon in his apartment in a century-old building a short walk from the Eiffel Tower.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/17/health/abortion-pill-inventor.html

USA – The Other Abortion Pill

In the U.S., medication abortion usually consists of two drugs. One of them has always mattered more.|

By Patrick Adams
SEPTEMBER 19, 2022

In the months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, demand for medication abortion has soared. The method already accounted for more than half of all abortions in the United States before the Court’s decision; now reproductive-rights activists and sites such as Plan C, which shares information about medication abortion by mail, are fielding an explosion in interest in abortion pills. As authorized by the FDA, medication abortion consists of two drugs. The first one, mifepristone, blocks the hormone progesterone, which is necessary for a pregnancy to continue. The second, misoprostol, brings on contractions of the uterus that expel its contents. The combination is, according to studies conducted in the U.S., somewhere between 95 percent and 99 percent effective in ending a pregnancy and is extremely safe.

Continued: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/09/abortion-pill-misoprostol-effectiveness/671465/