Questionable report used as basis for campaign to limit medication abortion
Politico reports that there is a campaign among anti-abortion activists to limit mifepristone. They are using flawed studies to justify it.
Politico reported that antiabortion activists are using an unreliable scientific study as the basis for a campaign to get the FDA, Congress, and courts to limit mifepristone availability.
The campaign has been called Rolling Thunder. The study came from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. The data collection was called The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event. It claims that abortion medication is 22 times as likely to cause adverse events as other studies have shown.
Brittni Frederiksen, associate director for Women’s Health Policy at the nonpartisan health care think tank KFF, was quoted in the original article. I arranged an interview with her to discuss the problems of the information gathered by the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Frederiksen said the report lacks peer review, transparency, and proper data sourcing, making it unreliable.
“The peer review process is very important for identifying flaws or gaps in the research, and so it lacks rigor in that regard,” Frederiksen said.
Frederiksen said the researchers are known for their pro-life stance. The report misclassified adverse events, such as emergency room visits and ectopic pregnancies, as related to mifepristone. Typically those aren’t considered adverse effects in most studies.
Additionally, the study's codes for medication abortion are questionable, potentially inflating the reported adverse events. Speaker 2 emphasizes the importance of medication abortion for early pregnancy management and criticizes the study's methodology and definitions.
“There are things included in this particular study that I would not consider an adverse event,” she said. “Trips to an emergency room, those are common, and people go when they're questioning whether they're bleeding too much or just want to be reassured that it's working properly.”