Tag Archives: Side Effects

News

New study: complication rate for chemical abortions is 5.2%

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Story from Life News.

Excerpt:

The UCSF study, “Incidence of Emergency Department Visits and Complications After Abortion,” is based on a recent study of California Medicaid recipients. It appeared in the December 8, 2014, edition of the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology.

California is one of the states that pays for the abortions of women enrolled in Medicaid. The study looked at the billing data from 50,273 Medi-Cal patients who had 54,911 abortions in 2009-2010.

[…]Nearly 8% (or between one in 12 and one in 13) of women showed up at the clinic or a local Emergency Room (ER) seeking some service within six weeks of their abortions. Some of those were eliminated from further study because billing records appeared to show that they came in for some service unrelated to the abortion. (These were not specified, but this could be something like smashing a finger in the car door, coming down with the flu, etc.)

But even pulling these out and other “complications not validated,” one is left with a substantial number of women dealing with medical problems resulting from their “safe” abortions.

On the billing records of those women returning to the clinic or going to the ER, they found women hemorrhaging, dealing with infections, uterine perforations – the sort of problems we’re supposed to think were relics of the early days following the Roe v. Wade decision when abortionists were just learning their craft.

A surprising number of these were related to the new chemical or “medication” abortion method that was supposed to offer women a safer alternative to surgical abortion.

There were nearly four times as many surgical abortions (34,755 first trimester, 8,837 2nd trimester or later) tracked by the study as there were chemical abortions. (11,319). Yet there were more identified complications associated with the chemical method (588) than they were for the surgical ones (438 for first trimester, 130 for 2nd or later) combined.

The complication rate for chemical abortions was 5.2%, versus complication rates of 1.3% for first trimester suction aspiration abortions and 1.5% for second trimester or later methods. This would make chemical abortions four times riskier than early surgical ones and more than three times less safe than a second or third trimester procedure.

This is hardly the “advance” or “improvement” that women were promised when the government was asked to approve RU-486 more than a decade ago.

I didn’t really want to take Life News’ word for this, so I looked up the study.

They’re right:

RESULTS: A total of 54,911 abortions among 50,273 fee-for-service Medi-Cal beneficiaries were identified. Among all abortions, 1 of 16 (6.4%, n=3,531) was followed by an ED visit within 6 weeks but only 1 of 115 (0.87%, n=478) resulted in an ED visit for an abortion-related complication. Approximately 1 of 5,491 (0.03%, n=15) involved ambulance transfers to EDs on the day of the abortion. The major complication rate was 0.23% (n=126, 1/436): 0.31% (n=35) for medication abortion, 0.16% (n=57) for first-trimester aspiration abortion, and 0.41% (n=34) for second-trimester or later procedures. The total abortion-related complication rate including all sources of care including EDs and the original abortion facility was 2.1% (n=1,156): 5.2% (n=588) for medication abortion, 1.3% (n=438) for first-trimester aspiration abortion, and 1.5% (n=130) for second-trimester or later procedures.

In other posts, I talked about the other risks associated with abortion.

Commentary

Should birth control pills be dispensed over the counter?

3 Comments

Andrea Mrozek in the Ottawa Citizen.

Excerpt:

Welcome to the world of Do It Yourself Doctoring. Recent reports indicate that the birth control pill may become available in the United States without a prescription. Proponents will claim this makes women’s lives healthier and easier. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The pill is not Tylenol or cough medication. Certainly it’s widely used. However, forever downplayed are the nasty and known side effects: There’s the risk of blood clots leading to stroke. There’s mood swings. There’s increased risk of cervical cancer, (alongside the highly touted effect of decreasing the risk of ovarian cancer). There’s a 44-per-cent increased risk of developing breast cancer for young women prior to having children, a finding published in the Mayo Clinic journal in 2006. Anecdotal evidence has some women feeling permanently nauseous, others get depressed. Still others say they lose, wait for the irony, the desire to have sex.

[…]Even some pro-choice women’s health advocates prefer to teach natural family planning (the symptothermal method) with the solid claim that it works with the same efficacy as oral contraceptives. The advantages are that it’s not a product you purchase and it works with a woman’s natural body rhythm. The disadvantages? It takes time to learn and teach, and pharmaceutical companies can’t make money on it.

These voices are hushed up in part because pharmaceutical companies have long tentacles, and in part because the pill remains the darling of old-school feminists. It is the great equalizer. On it, you can have sex anytime without ever getting pregnant, just like men do — or so we are told.

Read the rest, it’s very interesting.