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The abortion pill harms women
On 28 April 2025, the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) published the largest-known study into complications arising from the use of the abortion pills.[i] Jamie Bryan Hall and Ryan T. Anderson, analysed data from a U.S. insurance claims database that included 865,727 patient cases in which mifepristone had been prescribed for an induced medical
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Packer was let down by Lord and his team
On 08 May 2025, Nicola Packer, who was arrested on suspicion of an illegal abortion in November 2020, was cleared by the jury at Isleworth Crown Court. Her case is already being used as a cause célèbre by those campaigning for the decriminalisation of abortion, chief amongst them Jonathan Lord, an NHS consultant gynaecologist and
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11,000 not 300
In 2022, the most recent year for which we have official reporting of abortion statistics for England, more than 11,000 women were admitted and treated at an NHS hospital for complications arising from a medical abortion;[i] this represents about 6% of those women using mifepristone and misoprostol at home, or misoprostol at home after taking
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Every day 33 women are treated by NHS England for abortion complications
Official published data from NHS England show that every day, on average, 33 women are admitted as inpatients to an NHS hospital for treatment of abortion complications. This is more than double our earlier estimate of 14, which was based on FOI data.[i] This post: “Government under-reports abortion complications by a factor of 38x”, outlines
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Saying “Sorry”
Providers of regulated healthcare are obliged by law to say “Sorry” to patients when something goes wrong. The Care Quality Commission (CQC) details this in its Regulation 20: Duty of Candour. This post examines whether it is possible that BPAS failed to meet this statutory requirement in at least 5,000 cases during the last year.
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Government under-reports abortion complications by a factor of 38x
In 2022, official reporting of abortion complications by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) shows just 300 cases across England and Wales. For the year 2022-23, official data from NHS England show 11,256 women diagnosed with abortion complications at an NHS hospital. The NHS data are known to the OHID, as evidenced in…
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FOI requesting HES data on the treatment of abortion complications in England, 2017 to 2023.
We have published a new report outlining findings from an FOI investigation in which we requested data related to the diagnosis of abortion complications, from all NHS Hospital Trusts in England. Key Points The full report, with links to the FOI responses, can be accessed here.
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Complications reporting is complicated and incomplete
An effective medical abortion is defined by the MARE Guidelines[i] as a successful expulsion of an intrauterine pregnancy without the need for surgical intervention, clarified by the following sub-categories: So, given the clarity of the above definition, why in the UK do we have official reporting of abortion complication rates ranging from a rare 1-in-3,333
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Complications from Medical Abortion are still being under-reported by the UK Government
In its recently published report into abortion statistics for 2022 (England and Wales), the UK Government presented misleading and incomplete data about the numbers of complications arising from medical abortions; and worse still, they knew they were doing so.[i] In fairness to the reporting team at the Office for Health Improvement & Disparities, they do
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New Study Reveals FDA Relied on Cherrypicked Data to Approve Dangerous Mail-Order Abortion Drugs
A new peer-reviewed article highlights major flaws in the data used by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to remove medical safeguards and in-person administering of abortion drugs. These flaws illustrate the ongoing problem of lack of quality abortion reporting data in the U.S. as well as in the United Kingdom. In April 2021,
