How Abortion Pill Data Is Being Weaponized

Watch How Abortion Pill Data Is Being Weaponized - Bloomberg on Dailymotion

Transcript

00:00A lot of people think about the abortion pill. They probably have heard of that, but actually

00:05medication abortion is comprised of two pills. So you've got mifepristone, which is the pill that

00:10you take first, and that ends the pregnancy, stops it from growing. And then the second pill,

00:16misoprostol, which helps expel the pregnancy from the uterus. And you can take these up to 11 weeks

00:22into a pregnancy, and they're extremely effective. Prior to 2016, there were a lot of rules around

00:29medication abortion. You could only take these pills up to seven weeks. They had to be dispensed

00:34in a doctor's office, and you had to come back and get the second dose. It was onerous, right?

00:40The pills have opened up access in part because there's been so much discussion about their

00:45importance after the fall of Roe. And so there's just been a real push to make sure that women know

00:50this is an option that's available to you. One of the ways that abortion opponents have tried to

00:57shut down access to mifepristone is to argue that it's unsafe. But what they're doing is using data

01:04on women who do a very natural thing, which is they're uncertain about the process, and they go

01:09to their doctor or they go to the emergency room to understand whether their abortion is complete,

01:14flagging that as a safety issue. It's not. That's totally something normal and what anyone would do.

01:19Anyone who's having a miscarriage might do the same thing. And so that data is kind of being

01:25weaponized as this is unsafe to mail people pills because so many women are going to the doctor

01:31after. It's something to look out for because there's a study that's being cited by our health

01:36administration and by anti-abortion activists that really hits on this idea that it's not safe,

01:43but the data they're using is flawed.

01:45What does people do?