Doctors Right, Politicians Wrong on Prescribing Abortion Drugs
LatestHey, wow, who could’ve predicted this: a new study on mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs taken together to induce an abortion, shows that it’s perfectly safe to use a lower dosage of the drugs than the FDA recommends. Doctors have been saying that since at least 2001. It’s almost as though their medical training gives them a special understanding of how drugs work?
The study, released in the journal Contraception and which we saw via Think Progress, is important because for years, anti-abortion politicians have been passing laws to restrict RU-486, the drug that combines a dose of mifepristone and a dose of misoprostol, to its FDA-approved use, rather than allowing doctors to prescribe a lower-safer dose off-label or let them prescribe it slightly later in pregnancy than the FDA guidelines currently dictate. (Arizona, for example, wants to make RU-486 illegal after the seventh week of pregnancy, though most studies show it’s effective for about nine weeks, a very big differenced when you’re dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.)