Doctor clarifies misinformation fueling abortion reversal treatment activists
Dr. Mitchell Creinen has never had a patient ask about abortion reversal in three decades of practice
Antiabortion activists have pushed state lawmakers to craft legislation that would require doctors to advise abortion seekers of dangerous methods that would purportedly reverse the effects of mifepristone–the first pill in the abortion regimen.
Dr. Mitchell Creinen, an OB-GYN and professor at UC Davis Health at the University of California, led one of the few studies on abortion reversal.
“There's nothing scientifically sound to say this is anything other than a mythical hypothetical treatment,” Creinen said.
He had to abandon it because of safety concerns for the participants. He had enrolled people who had planned on getting a surgical abortion. They agreed to partake in the study and delayed their abortion a couple of weeks to study the effect of abortion reversal, where progesterone is used to counteract the effects of mifepristone.
They couldn't draw conclusive results because the study had to be stopped. However, the evidence indicates that abortion reversal is dangerous.
In his 30 years of practice, Creinen has never had a single person ask about abortion reversal. He feels its prevalence is embellished mainly due to the same misinformation crisis that has hampered other medical care, including vaccination efforts for COVID-19 and the flu.
“The more I claim or more I say the same thing over and over again, even though it's a lie, you start to believe it's the truth,” Creinen said. “And that's the issue here”
Somehow, there must be an effort to get reliable expertise to the public to counteract this information. Journalism requires funding, and so does medical scholarship. But most people won’t want to pay for information, even if it goes through fact-checking and peer review, and would be far more reliable to base decisions on.
Stateline reported recently that Republican lawmakers in at least 14 states have passed laws requiring healthcare providers to give patients information about abortion reversal. Kansas became the 15th state this year. Meanwhile, Democratic-controlled Colorado this year moved in the opposite direction, becoming the first state to effectively ban abortion reversal treatment, designating it as medical misconduct.
“There's nothing scientific,” Creinen said. “We shouldn't be writing laws without any evidence to back up the laws. And that's really where we are. So this is all part of the anti-choice, religious zealot movement to try to create a false narrative.”
One of Creinen’s students asked why the medical boards didn’t go after this fraud. He told him that they probably had more significant concerns to deal with in the opioid epidemic and abusive prescription.
“It doesn't make it any less important or less wrong,” Creinen said. “But we're relying on an understaffed medical agency to say doctors should go after this issue when there are bigger issues they're dealing with.”