About a fourth of U.S. women getting early abortions last year did so with drugs rather than surgery, statistics show, as a new study reported improved safety in using the so-called “abortion pill.”
Some experts predict the percentage of such “medical abortions,” which offer more privacy than surgical termination at an abortion clinic or a hospital, will rise even more as a result of the new study.
The research, done at Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, shows that a new way of giving pills to induce abortion virtually eliminated the risk of a rare but dangerous infection.
“This is the first really huge documentation of how safe and effective medical abortion is,” said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, a professor of family health and population at Columbia University.
Two pills are used to induce an abortion. The primary drug, Mifeprex, was first approved in the U.S. in 2000. Use has risen steadily, even though manufacturer Danco Laboratories LLC of New York hasn’t promoted it and the drug can be obtained only at a clinic or doctor’s office, not through a pharmacy.
Medical abortions now account for about a quarter of early abortions, a company spokeswoman said. At Planned Parenthood, the biggest provider of medical abortions, they amount to 32 percent of early terminations.
The group’s study analyzed medical abortions at Planned Parenthood centers between 2005 and mid-2008 — about 228,000 cases. It found the abortion pill was about 98.5 percent effective and that changes in how the drugs were given reduced risk of a serious infection from barely 1 in 1,000 cases to 0.06 in 1,000.
The results are being reported in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Originally, the procedure involved inserting one of the pills, misoprostol, into the vagina, where the medicine was absorbed. But by the end of 2005, four U.S. women and one Canadian had died of a rare bacterial infection afterward.
So in April 2006, Planned Parenthood told its clinics to instead have patients put the misoprostol pill in their mouth and let it dissolve. Some clinics also began providing a week’s course of antibiotics to avoid infection. In 2008, all the clinics started giving patients antibiotics.
