On Idaho Gov. Butch Otter’s desk is a bill mandating that the state Department of Health & Welfare provide abortion providers and their clients with information about an unproven and medically unapproved method that allegedly reverses medication abortions already underway. Every Democratic senator and representative in the legislature voted against it. One of them, Rep. Melissa Wintrow (D-Boise), told a reporter for the Spokane Spokesman-Review:
“I think this is a very dangerous bill and it is a travesty that it is going forward … based on a study conducted on six women.” She said, “It’s not a protocol, and it’s not a scientific study, and it’s not a real thing.” She said, “Women can make up their own minds and they don’t need to have a bunch of information that is misleading and is misguided.”
Providing misleading information on abortion and its impacts is a major industry of the forced-birthers. Abortion reversal is just their latest lie.
Medication abortions require the use of two pills in sequence: mifepristone, which ends the pregnancy, followed by misoprostol, which expels the fetus. Women typically take the first pill in a doctor’s office and the second at home. That doesn’t apply in the 19 states that require a woman to take both pills with a physician present, which means telemedicine for the safe procedure is outlawed, and cost of the abortion in both time and money is increased. About one third of women who terminate their pregnancies early in gestation now choose a medication abortion.
Dr. George Delgado of the phony crisis pregnancy center called Culture of Life Family Services in San Diego has been spreading the word about the procedure he claims can reverse two-step medication abortions when a woman changes her mind after the first step. Instead of taking the misoprostol, the woman can get an injection of the hormone progesterone to stop the abortion. Physicians interviewed by Nina Liss-Schultz view the procedure with suspicion and worry.
The American Medical Association and the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) have opposed reversal laws.
In a fact sheet, ACOG states that the study showing four out of six women continued their pregnancies after taking misoporstol and then getting injections of progresterone:
This is not scientific evidence that progesterone resulted in the continuation of those pregnancies. This study was not supervised by an institutional review board (IRB) or an ethical review committee, required to protect human research subjects, raising serious questions regarding the ethics and scientificvalidity of the results. [...]
Legislative mandates based on unproven, unethical research are dangerous to women’s health.Politicians should never mandate treatments or require that physicians tell patients inaccurate information.
Planned Parenthood has also opposed the legislation as "harmful" with “no basis in science":
“Everybody deserves accurate information and comprehensive medical care and this bill does the exact opposite,” said Mistie Tolman, Idaho Public Affairs Manager at PPVNH. “This reckless bill is bad medicine and a clear indication that legislators need to leave the practice of medicine to medical professionals. Reversing a medication abortion is an unproven procedure with no basis in science. The legislature should focus on measures that actually improve access to health care. Since they aren’t, we will never stop fighting for high-quality, nonjudgmental, medically accurate health care and education.”
Elsewhere last year, state legislators across the country tried to pass abortion reversal bills. Arizona, Arkansas, and South Dakota put them on the books. But such bills were defeated in Colorado, and got stalled in committee in North Carolina, Indiana and Georgia. Americans United for Life has, according to Vice News, created a playbook of model legislation about abortion reversal. Last year, federal officials delayed the taking of the second pill in a medication abortion by an undocumented teenager while they discussed with her abortion reversal. She chose to go ahead with the second bill.
No doubt, as with a boatload of other abortion-restricting bills passed in the past decade, we’ll see more states trying and sometimes succeeding to get abortion reversal legislation onto the books because, for many forced-birthers, lying about abortion is divinely inspired.