Analysis

‘I’ve lost count’: Doctors raise alarm on increase in abortion pill complications

Abortion pill complications are sending women to the emergency room, according to Dr. Brent Boles, a practicing board-certified OB/GYN associated with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and Heartbeat International.

On May 20, 2023, Dr. Boles wrote about one disturbing case in a Twitter thread which read:

On my way to the ER at 0247 in the morning to take care of a patient who did a chemical abortion more than two weeks ago and has now dumped about 1/3 of her blood volume out onto the floor. So much for safer than Tylenol. I’ve lost count of how many of these I’ve seen. @aaplog

He added “[…] the hack that took her $800 for a medication abortion ignored the bleeding it caused. She had to seek care elsewhere. And when she came to my ER, she got it.”

 

Image: Dr Brent Boles tweets Abortion pill complications ER

Dr Brent Boles tweets Abortion pill complications ER

A separate Twitter thread published on June 19 by Dr. Boles detailed additional cases of abortion pill complications:

It’s a little after 3 AM at work and I just helped another MD take care of a mifepristone disaster. She took it 2 weeks ago and tonight she ruptured her ectopic pregnancy and lost her fallopian tube and a lot of blood. 2nd mifepristone disaster I’ve seen in a week. 1/2…

The other one had such bad reactions to the mifeprex/misoprostol that she came to ER in shock. She had CNS symptoms that required a CT of the head to rule out stroke (yes, there are case reports of strokes with medication abortion) then she still had to have a D&C for… 2/3 [retained tissue].

And she asked Planned Parenthood for a surgical abortion because she has 2 serious diseases and was afraid of medication side effects, and when she tried to explain to the doctor he told her to ‘sit down and shut up.’ If she had had a surgical abortion, 3/4 She would not have spent three days in the hospital after arriving in critical condition.

Dr Brent Boles tweets abortion pill complication ER June 2023

Dr Brent Boles tweets abortion pill complication ER June 2023

Other Doctors Claim Abortion Pill Complications 

Doctors involved in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM) v. U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abortion pill lawsuit, have also claimed that they are seeing women with severe complications — “many who presented to the emergency room.”

Dr. Nancy Goodwine-Wozniak claimed in the AHM Lawsuit:

In my observation, incidents of women presenting to emergency departments with complaints of bleeding are becoming increasingly more common… One of my patients who was about nine weeks pregnant… sought an abortion at Planned Parenthood of Indiana. The woman was given mifepristone by the doctor…

The woman called an Uber for a ride home from Planned Parenthood. The woman began to experience bleeding and other adverse side effects from the mifepristone. The woman’s Uber driver did not take her home because she was so ill and instead brought her to the hospital’s emergency department…

I treated the patient for the adverse effects she suffered… 

“After taking the chemical abortion drugs, she began having very heavy bleeding followed by significant abdominal pain and a fever. When I saw her in the emergency room, she had evidence of retained pregnancy tissue along with endometritis, an infection of the uterine lining. She also had acute kidney injury, with elevate creatinine,” another doctor testified.

Another claimed, “My group practice admitted three women to the hospital… in one month due to chemical abortion complications.”

Another doctor testified that he has encountered “at least a dozen cases of life-threatening complications” from these drugs, and the frequency of these emergency situations has only increased over time.

AAPLOG CEO Dr. Christina Francis described what she has been hearing from doctors on the ground. “I was sitting and talking with a couple of the emergency room physicians, and they were telling me how frustrated they were because weekly, women were coming into our emergency room with complications related to chemical abortions,” she noted. “What I’ve seen over the last few years is the frequency of complications related to chemical abortion drugs is increasing significantly.”

Even pro-abortion doctors are admitting to seeing these abortion pill complications. A group of emergency department doctors (some openly admitting to be pro-abortion) recently presented the case of a woman who took the abortion pill and was later treated in the emergency room for an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy. But disturbingly, rather than put the onus on the abortion industry for failing to appropriately identify the potentially deadly complication beforehand, the group of medical doctors warned ER doctors to be on alert as abortion clients present to emergency departments for care after taking the abortion pill.

Studies Reveal Likelihood of Abortion Pill Complications 

Abortion advocates often claim the abortion pill — which can be accessed by minors — is safe… so safe the industry is pushing for the pills to be dispensed without any medical oversight. Yet the industry’s own Telabortion study, which implemented more stringent safety requirements than are in effect today with mail order abortion pills, revealed that six percent of “known outcomes” from the abortion pill were severe enough to result in emergency room or urgent care visits, with additional women experiencing serious adverse events.

The results of that Gynuity Health Projects (GHP) study found that 70 out of 1,157 participants (6%) faced complications from the abortion pill, resulting in ER or urgent care visits. In addition, there were 10 serious adverse events, eight (8) hospitalizations and five (5) transfusions. Just over 4% (47 women) required surgical interventions (generally due to incomplete or failed abortions), and 7.8% (92 others) required outpatient visits following their abortions. That data is reflective of abortion pill complications now being reported in the United Kingdom.

In 2021, Live Action News documented a Charlotte Lozier Institute study which claimed to show that the rate of abortion-related emergency room visits following a chemical abortion increased over 500% between 2002 and 2015 within the study population, which included women residing within the 17 states which provide Medicaid funding for abortion who were over 13 years of age.

A recent study of abortion pill adverse events found that abortion pill complications are underreported, and abortion pill clients experiencing complications are more likely to receive care from an emergency center than the abortion facility.

Despite all this evidence, the abortion industry and their political allies are calling for more expansion of the abortion pill. In addition, abortion industry power players are encouraging women to lie and simply tell ER doctors they are naturally miscarrying when they are actually experiencing abortion pill complications.

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