the highly controversial experimental practice is behind a creeping number of abortion “reversal” bills being introduced in the u.s. — laws that compel doctors, on pain of civil or criminal penalties, to inform women that it may be possible to undo a medication-induced (but not surgical) abortion once started, a claim the american medical association and other leading medical groups say is “patently false” and wholly unsupported by scientific evidence.
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on pro-life websites in canada , women who take the first pill are told “the process can be reversed,” but that time is of the essence. canadian physicians for life tells women that “if you would like to keep your baby,” they have two options: contact the abortion reversal hotline to be connected to a local doctor, or, if there isn’t a doctor registered with the network in their area, to take a “dear colleague” form letter immediately to their family doctor or nearest walk-in clinic for the supplemental progesterone.
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of delgado’s six-case study of abortion “reversal” with progesterone published in in 2012, four of six women carried their pregnancies to term.
more recently, the california doctor published a retrospective review in issues in law and medicine , a journal co-sponsored by a pro-life organization, based on data from the abortion rescue hotline. the study initially involved 754 women who took progesterone in an effort to “reverse” the abortion. after excluding a quarter of the women for different reasons, delgado and colleagues reported an overall rate of reversal of 48 per cent, rising to 64 per cent among women given progesterone via injection. “there was no apparent increased risk in birth defects,” they said.
“you need the second medication that brings on the actual contractions that allow for expulsion or delivery” of the fetus, costescu said. as dr. daniel grossman of the university of california, san francisco and kari white of the university of alabama at birmingham wrote in the new england journal of medicine , “there is no evidence that treatment (with progesterone) is superior to doing nothing at all.” laws promoting reversal, they wrote, “essentially encourage women to participate in an unmonitored research experiment.”
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abortion interruption bills aren’t going unchallenged: just days before delgado’s presentation to the ottawa gathering of doctors, an oklahoma judge temporarily halted a law that threatens doctors with felony charges if they don’t inform women about reversal treatment.
a north dakota judge issued a similar ruling in september , calling that state’s reversal law “devoid of scientific support.”
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