Ingrid Skop, M.D., FACOG

There are humane medical interventions that aim for both mother and her unborn child to live when possible and do not inflict direct violence on the unborn child.

Many undocumented assumptions have been made to portray unsupervised, “self-managed” medical abortion as safe. These erroneous conclusions will, in fact, cause the procedure to become more dangerous for a woman seeking abortion, and will be addressed below.

A particularly malignant form of “misinformation” is being spread to women today.  Flawed information regarding “self-managed” abortion has the potential to seriously injure the women I care for as an obstetrician/gynecologist.

The failure of abortion providers to support and undertake prospective longitudinal studies of a nationally representative sample of women contributes to our belief that the ideological biases of abortion providers have led to a combination of disinterest, willful ignorance, or even a conspiracy to hide the widespread dangers of unwanted and contraindicated abortions.

Existing research on postabortion emergency room visits is sparse and limited by methods which underestimate the incidence of adverse events following abortion. Postabortion emergency room (ER) use since Food and Drug Administration approval of chemical abortion in 2000 can identify trends in the relative morbidity burden of chemical versus surgical procedures.

The prevalence of induced abortion among women with children has been estimated indirectly by projections derived from survey research. However, an empirically derived, population-based conclusion on this question is absent from the published literature.

A trend of mounting concern is occurring in abortion provision.  When elective induced abortion was legalized in the United States in 1973, one oft-cited motivation was to improve abortion’s safety, as it was frequently claimed that many women were injured and sometimes died from illegal abortions. Recently, abortion advocates have changed their strategy. Whereas once they claimed they wanted abortion to be “safe, legal and rare,” now they favor immediate access and convenience to abortion for all women experiencing unintended pregnancies, regardless of whether it might be more dangerous for a woman, or whether the law prohibits it. Thus, they have begun encouraging women to seek more dangerous, “self-managed” abortions.

The current measuring metric and reporting methods for assessing maternal mortality are seriously flawed. Evidence-based prevention strategies require consistently reported surveillance data and validated measurement metrics.

Controversy exists regarding whether doctors who perform abortions should be required to hold hospital admitting privileges, but no research exists as to the extent to which they actually hold and use such privileges.