The Bogus ‘Category 5 Hurricane’ Hitting the Abortion Pill

By Ross Pomeroy | May 2, 2025 | 11:54am

Photo illustration by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Trump Administration Abortion

The Bogus ‘Category 5 Hurricane’ Hitting the Abortion Pill

A new report from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a religious conservative think tank, is being hailed amongst right-wingers as “the statistical equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry.”

According to the report, the rate of serious adverse events amongst women who used mifepristone to medically induce an abortion is not 0.5 percent, but rather 11 percent. Mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone (needed for a pregnancy to continue), is commonly used with the ulcer prevention drug misoprostol to safely and effectively end pregnancies at fewer than ten weeks gestation.

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Some on the right are using the report to cudgel FDA Commissioner Martin Makary to restrict or even ban the use of mifepristone. Makary last week said he has “no plans to take action” to restrict the availability of mifepristone. He did, however, leave the door open to take action if the data changed.

“There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone,” he said. “So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”

One would hope that Makary, a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a respected gastrointestinal surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, will recognize that the “data” in the EPPC’s new report is complete and utter garbage.

The report’s authors based their analysis on 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from an insurance claims database, which immediately raises a red flag. The vast majority of women do not use insurance to pay for their medical abortions. The FDA estimates that 7.5 million women have used the drug to terminate a pregnancy since Fall of 2000. So if you’re only focusing on women who’ve used insurance in the process of their medical abortion, then they’re already far likelier to have suffered an “adverse event.”

The EPPC’s characterization of “serious adverse event” raises further doubts about the study’s findings. The authors identified 167,855 of these events in total, but nearly nine in ten of them raise serious eyebrows.

For starters, they include 40,960 emergency room visits. Note, these are visits and not hospital admissions. While nobody ever wants to go to an ER, a visit is not technically a serious adverse event, according to the FDA. You can tell that the EPPC is being intentionally shifty here because they do list hospitalizations in their data.

The authors also list 28,658 instances of hemorrhage, also known as bleeding. But bleeding commonly accompanies a miscarriage or abortion and is only serious if it necessitates a transfusion. Since the authors tallied 1,257 cases of transfusion, we can assume that the cases of hemorrhage they included did not fall into that serious category.

The authors also included 24,563 cases of surgical abortion in their tally of serious adverse events – 2.84 percent of the 865,727 abortions in their data. These shouldn’t be counted. Patients are informed that medication abortion is 95 to 97 percent effective, meaning that one out of every 25 or so women will need a surgical abortion. It is not an adverse event but rather a potential outcome of treatment, one that does not typically endanger health.

Perhaps most strangely, the authors also listed “ectopic pregnancy” as a serious adverse event, recording 3,062 cases. An ectopic pregnancy is a pregnancy that develops outside of the uterus. Mifepristone neither causes ectopic pregnancy nor does it treat one.

Finally, the authors recorded 49,169 “other abortion-specific complications” in their serious adverse event tally. They vaguely described these as “codes specifically related to an abortion or miscarriage, as well as life-threatening mental health diagnoses, etc.” That “etc.” is doing some heavy lifting.

The EPPC’s dubious report was published days after a study revealed Republican think tanks’ shady relationship with scientific evidence.

Researchers from Northwestern University and James Madison University looked at 191,118 policy documents published by 121 US-based ideological think tanks after 1999. They found that Democrat-linked think tanks tend to cite more highly cited, and thus impactful, papers. Democrats also were more likely to cite papers that had passed peer review, the process in which experts scrutinize their colleagues’ papers before publication.

It seems that Democrats tend to shape their ideology and policies to scientific evidence, while Republicans cherry pick and distort scientific evidence to fit their ideology. With their non-peer-reviewed “science,” the EPPC provides a textbook example.