Heartbeat International, affiliated with more than 2,000 facilities, aims to convince people to continue their pregnancies
The organization behind an international network of anti-abortion facilities is misleading people with claims that abortions can be “reversed”, a lawsuit filed on Monday by Letitia James, the New York attorney general, alleges.
The organization, Heartbeat International, is affiliated with more than 2,000 facilities that aim to convince people to continue their pregnancies. In recent years, many such centers, which are often Christian and sometimes known as crisis pregnancy centers, have started to promote a controversial practice known as “abortion pill reversal”, which claims that people can halt a medication abortion midway through.
The first randomized, controlled clinical study to attempt to study this “reversal” protocol’s effectiveness came to an abrupt stop in 2019, after three participants landed in the hospital hemorrhaging blood. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the pre-eminent membership group for OB-GYNS, has said that claims about abortion reversal are “not based on science and do not meet clinical standards”.
The general horrificness of this aside. How do you recruit participants for a study like this? “Do you want to be pregnant but don’t mind having an abortion? Would you like an abortion but don’t mind if you actually get it reversed?”
I can’t find the original study, but according to this NPR article they were all scheduled for surgical abortions.
The abortion pill is a two pill process - the study was to find out if progesterone injections could reverse the effects of taking the first pill only.