If Abortion Is Healthcare, Why Is Abortion Data Going Unreported?

Authored by Samantha Flom via RealClear Politics (emphasis ours),

We were told mifepristone is “safer than Tylenol” by pro-abortion activists. Now women are discovering how lethal that lie really is.

“Abortion care is healthcare!”

The oft-repeated claim of the abortion lobby emerges whenever someone dares to question whether an elective procedure with the goal of ending a human being’s life really qualifies as medical “care.”

But with explosive new research by the Foundation for the Restoration of America exposing that more than one in 10 women who have a chemical abortion experience serious adverse side effects – including death – the time has come to revisit that argument.

If chemical abortion is healthcare, why do the women who choose that path suffer at an alarming rate, and why have we never heard this before?

The short answer: Medical providers have no federal obligation to tell us.

While most states enforce some form of mandatory abortion reporting, there is no national requirement that they report that data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And as states set their own reporting standards, what little information that gets voluntarily provided to the CDC amounts to a jumbled mix of demographics with too many holes to paint a clear picture.

The pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute reports that just 28 states require public health reporting on any complications that arise from abortions. In the case of mifepristone, the first pill in the two-drug chemical abortion regimen, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) acknowledges that those complications could include such life-threatening conditions as sepsis, hemorrhage, uterine rupture, ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and even death.

Despite those known risks, chemical abortion has become the most popular method for pregnancy termination in the United States, accounting for 63% of all abortions – or about 642,700 abortions – in 2023, according to Guttmacher.

Yet the Foundation for the Restoration of America’s review of insurance claims data for 2017 through 2023 revealed an average adverse event rate of 10.9% for every chemical abortion – a risk rate 22 times higher than the FDA admits.

That means more than 70,000 women likely experienced at least one serious adverse health event from a chemical abortion in 2023.

Suddenly, ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting last year on the supposed dangers of restricting abortion seems woefully incomplete… and dangerously misleading.

The outlet framed the 2022 deaths of Amber Nicole Thurman, 28, and Candi Miller, 41, as the result of delayed care due to Georgia’s ban on most abortions after roughly six weeks of pregnancy.

In Thurman’s case, her symptoms reportedly progressed from typical cramping to severe bleeding that worsened over the course of several days. Five days after taking the first pill, she vomited blood and passed out. It was only because her boyfriend found her and called 911 that she even made it to the hospital, where doctors eventually diagnosed her with acute severe sepsis.

While the doctors undeniably waited too long to perform the dilation and curettage procedure necessary to remove the remaining tissue from Thurman’s uterus and save her life, there is no evidence to suggest Georgia’s abortion law played a role in that decision. In fact, the law includes an exception for procedures performed to save the life of a mother, and Thurman’s life was clearly at risk.

The truth is, even if her doctors were hesitant to intervene, it wouldn’t change the source of Thurman’s deteriorating health: the abortion pills.

Miller, like Thurman, suffered an incomplete abortion and neglected to seek emergency care as her symptoms grew increasingly severe. After spending several days moaning in agony, she was found unresponsive in her bed.

An autopsy later revealed that Miller still had fetal tissue in her uterus and a lethal combination of painkillers in her system, including fentanyl. But would she have taken the painkillers if the abortion pills had worked as intended? Probably not.

ProPublica downplayed the complications both women experienced as “rare” side effects of the chemical abortion regimen. But as the latest evidence suggests, they are anything but rare.

Planned Parenthood and its media defenders claim that chemical abortion is “safer than … Tylenol.”

Let’s put that claim to the test with federal reporting requirements.

If abortion in general is truly as safe and effective as the procedure’s advocates claim, they should have no problem with medical providers collecting and reporting the data to prove it.

Women have a right to know the risks of any medication they might consider taking. Setting aside the cavernous divide on the morality of killing an unborn child, one would hope we can at least all agree that women deserve better from the pharmaceutical industry than a one-in-10 chance of ending their own lives, too.

Samantha Flom is a senior investigative researcher for Restoration News. Her work has also appeared in The Epoch Times and on the Right Side Broadcasting Network website.