(LifeSiteNews) – A new study found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, skewing the data on both chemical abortions and pregnancy.
On May 29, the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) announced the release of a study it led examining Medicaid claims data for almost 29,000 ER visits within 30 days of abortions, as well as the severity and complexity of each case.
It found that visits after the use of abortion drugs were 79% more likely to be “miscoded as miscarriages compared with surgical abortions,” with almost 84% of such cases miscoded from 2016 to 2021. Further, those visits “were significantly more likely to be severe: Among drug-induced abortion cases, miscoded visits were 50% more likely to be labeled high acuity over correctly coded visits.”
“Miscoding via concealment of the abortion could result in delay of the delivery of necessary care or otherwise influence or misdirect important decisions in the management of the patient’s condition. Miscoding could also result from medical coding errors subsequent to an ED visit rather than active concealment by the patient, with both purposeful and accidental misclassifications resulting in the underreporting of post-abortion complications. As an example, studies have indicated that more than half of women who carry out a medical abortion experience severe pain,” the study explained.
“Very recent studies have indicated that women are not prepared for the level of pain they feel, that for some it is comparable to the pain of a delivery and not, as often described to them, ‘like your period’ … Due to the prevalence of miscoding, if women sought medical attention in the emergency department for their unexpected severe pain, these episodes may be identified as the result of spontaneous abortion and not the medical abortion. These miscoded abortion complications remain invisible to research scientists resulting in a large underestimation of actual medical abortion complications,” the study continued.
“When abortion-related emergencies are disguised as miscarriages, it impairs a doctor’s ability to make informed, evidence-based decisions. That isn’t just a documentation error — it’s a public health crisis,” said Dr. James Studnicki, CLI vice president and director of data analytics.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the abortion lobby is working feverishly to cancel out those deterrents with a variety of tactics, especially the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of contraceptive and abortion pills across state lines, regardless of the risks to the women they are supposedly serving.
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” Catholic University of America research associate Michael New wrote. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
Whether the issue will be resolved nationally remains to be seen. President Donald Trump has taken a number of pro-life actions since returning to office, but said on the campaign trail that he would not enforce federal law prohibiting abortion pills from being dispensed by mail. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills.
