By Grazie Pozo Christie
A growing number of states are enacting laws requiring doctors who perform pharmaceutical abortions to inform the mothers that it may be possible to halt the abortion if they change their minds.
Now, the Center for Reproductive Rights and the American Medical Association are suing North Dakota, claiming that the state is forcing physicians to deliver misleading and nonmedical information. Authors of an article in the New England Journal of Medicine also decry these laws on the basis that the “abortion pill reversal” regimen has not been definitively proven to be effective.
The truth is that retrospective clinical studies have shown reversals to be successful more than half the time. And even though randomized and placebo controlled trials have not been performed (and indeed probably cannot be performed from an ethical perspective), the regimen offered to a woman who has changed her mind is the same offered across the world to any woman who is in the process of miscarrying a wanted child. A woman who regrets her decision to abort (and women often resort to abortion under pressure) has the right to be offered the same chance to save her baby as any other woman whose pregnancy is threatened.
