Medical (as opposed to surgical) abortions consist of two pills taken over several days. They have become more common during the pandemic amid restrictions on travel and access to health facilities. The so-called ‘abortion pill reversal’ claims to interrupt the medical termination of a pregnancy with high doses of hormones.
When asked about the potential health risks of this ‘reversal’ method, the UK doctor told our undercover reporter: “At the end of the day, you live in the UK, you’ve got a hospital there and if you were worried about the bleeding, you’d go get help.”
This is a particularly scary answer if you consider that the only clinical trial into the safety and efficacy of ‘abortion pill reversal’, conducted in the US, was halted in 2019 after several participants were hospitalised with severe haemorrhaging.
The procedure prescribed to our reporter by the UK doctor sounded like shock therapy: “Put one pessary into the vagina and one pessary into the back passage. Do that every six hours for four doses, and then go down to one tablet three times a day for five days, and then just once a day right up to 14 weeks.”
It is unclear how many women this doctor personally prescribed ‘abortion pill reversal’ to. Heartbeat International, the US Christian right group that promotes this ‘treatment’, says that at least 60 women in the UK tried it in the first half of 2020.
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