A new report from the National Right to Life Committee highlights why complications from abortion drugs are frequently left underreported, raising fresh concerns about the growing use of chemical abortions in the United States.
The NRLC says abortion advocates and their media allies have engaged in a deliberate effort to portray abortion pills as safer than they truly are. The scrutiny comes as the Biden administration has rolled back nearly every safeguard on access to the drugs, while the Trump administration has promised to review the data. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has accused the Biden administration of “twisting” the numbers.
The issue is not just political. The Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) has reported that 10.93 percent of women experience serious complications—including sepsis, infection, or hemorrhaging—within 45 days of a chemical abortion using mifepristone. That rate, researchers noted, is at least 22 times higher than the less-than-0.5 percent figure reported in drug label trials. NRLC believes the true rate is likely higher still.
One major reason, according to the new report, is that many women are told to hide their use of abortion pills when seeking medical treatment. Aid Access, an international abortion-pill distributor, openly advised women in 2020 to claim they were experiencing a miscarriage rather than disclose they had taken abortion drugs. The group’s founder, Rebecca Gomperts, reiterated this advice in 2024. Because the symptoms mimic miscarriage, emergency room physicians often do not record chemical abortion as the cause, leaving the complication data incomplete.
This deception, NRLC argues, endangers women and skews medical records. “Sudden and dramatic increases of complications among mifepristone patients coming in for treatment at the emergency room may be incorrectly attributed to pregnancy in general and may appear to indicate a disturbing and unexplained jump in miscarriage, rather than a direct outcome of growing mifepristone use,” the report states.
Read the report here.