UK researcher: 54,000 women hospitalized in 5 years for abortion pill complications

A researcher says that more than 54,000 women "have been admitted to an NHS hospital in England for the treatment of complications arising from the use of abortion pills" in the five years since the United Kingdom introduced its "pills-by-post" scheme in 2020.

Researcher Kevin Duffy, who recently released his report, is a former director and consultant with Marie Stopes International (MSI), which changed it's name to MSI Reproductive Choices in 2020 to obscure its ties to eugenicist Marie Stopes. Duffy, who is now pro-life, operates the Percuity Blog.

Key Takeaways:

• Former MSI Reproductive Choices director turned pro-life researcher Kevin Duffy reports that over five years, over 54,000 women have been hospitalized due to abortion pill complications. That's nearly 11,000 yearly, on average.

• Duffy says this breaks down to 1 in 17 women who have been hospitalized with abortion pill complications.

• Duffy clarified to Live Action News that these hospital admissions were after referral from outpatient settings or emergency rooms.

• The statistics have been tracked since the UK's "pills-by-post" scheme went into effect in 2020.

The Backstory:

Duffy previously discussed his time at MSI and how the abortion organization had begun pushing for "self-managed" chemical abortions:

“From about 2015-2016, MSI began to emphasise a strategic push towards self-managed medical abortion, supplying abortion drugs through pharmacies. 

I was never a supporter of this, preferring instead for women to receive, what I considered at the time, comprehensive care in-clinic.

Across the abortion sector, there were and are many reports raising concerns that increasing numbers of women are presenting with incomplete abortions at facilities after self-administering abortion pills which they had bought in the local drug shops."

The Details:

Abortion Pill by Mail's Disastrous Outcomes

According to Duffy's Percuity blog (emphasis added):

Analysis of accredited official statistics published by NHS England and the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, shows that 1-in-17 of all women self-managing their abortion at home, will subsequently be admitted for hospital treatment of an incomplete medical abortion or other complications arising from medical abortion. Women should be fully informed of these potential risks and the government should be reporting these statistics on an annual basis, but neither of these is currently happening.

"These are admissions to specialist wards such as OBGYN for treatment, essentially inpatient care, though some may have been day cases with no overnight stay. These admissions are after referral from ER or some other outpatient setting," Duffy clarified for Live Action News.

Duffy's NHS England analysis of hospitalizations for treatment of abortion complications by year shows the following annual numbers:

• 2020-21 - 8,618

• 2021-22 - 10,078

• 2022-23 - 11,256

• 2023-24 - 12,287

• 2024-25 - 12,140

The data reflects concerns raised by many in the United States regarding an increase in women visiting emergency departments after REMS safety regulations were weakened by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under the Biden-Harris administration. Biden's FDA also removed in-person dispensing and enabled mail-order and pharmacy dispensing of the abortion pill mifepristone (200 mg).

Those decisions are now the focus of court cases involving multiple states — Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Missouri, among others — which claim that abortion pill risks have been undercounted and that mail-order abortions have also resulted in coercion.

The pro-life Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) in the UK noted (emphasis added):

Despite the scale of the problem, neither the government nor abortion providers report these figures annually, leaving many women unaware of the risks they face. NHS data published in September 2025 showed that 12,140 women were admitted to hospital for abortion-related complications in 2024–25 alone, following a steady year-on-year rise since the scheme’s launch.

Most abortions in England now occur at home, with 75 percent self-managed in 2022. The two largest providers, BPAS and MSI Reproductive Choices, claim the failure rate is between 2 and 3 percent. However, manufacturers of the abortion drugs state the risk is significantly higher, warning of a 4.5 to 7.8 percent chance of failure requiring surgical intervention.

The government has also admitted that its own reporting is incomplete. In 2023, OHID published a one-off report comparing abortion notification figures with hospital admission data and found a dramatic discrepancy: just 300 complications were reported through the Abortion Notification System, compared with more than 11,000 admissions recorded by hospitals.

Ministers have since declined to publish such data annually, despite the fact that producing the figures takes minutes and could ensure women are properly informed.

UK and US See Similar Data

"We know from [Office for Health Improvement and Disparities] OHID published statistics that 75% of all abortions across England in 2022 were self-managed by women at home; 60% using pills-by-post and 15% self-administering the misoprostol at home after being treated with mifepristone at an abortion facility, in total 180,636 women," wrote Duffy.

"Based on the assumption that women having their abortion at an abortion facility would be provided all necessary treatment by that provider, we find just over 6% of women self-managing their abortion at home were subsequently admitted to an NHS hospital for essential treatment of complications arising from their use of the abortion pills, 1-in-17," Duffy added.

That 6% figure matches previous Live Action News estimates for the U.S., based on clinical trials likely doing appropriate screenings and follow-ups.

However, real world data shows that figure could potentially be double — in part, because the manufacturers of the drug (namely Danco or generic manufacturers GenBioPro (GBP) and Evita Solutions, LLC) have failed to police the drug's prescribers.

Live Action News' "Bad Actors" series and other reports exposed how abortion providers fail to meet FDA safety requirements and are prescribing the drug much later in pregnancy than is FDA-approved. They are also failing to rule out potentially dangerous ectopic pregnancies, failing to verify pregnancy or gestational age, failing to conduct labs or other testing, failing to follow up with patients, and hiding potential complications in a deliberate scheme that advises women to bypass the prescriber and go straight to emergency rooms for complications. They have also been instructed to lie to hospital staff and claim they are experiencing a natural miscarriage.

The Bottom Line:

"The government is fully aware of the numbers of women being admitted to hospital for treatment of abortion complications but for some reason seems unwilling to report these on an annual basis," wrote Duffy. "Surely it is time that abortion providers should be held to account by the regulators to ensure women are given accurate information about the risk of treatment failure and complications, including the need for hospital admission; deliberately minimising and misleading women about the reality of these risks is no longer acceptable."