Since the Supreme Court’s historic reversal on abortion a year ago, misinformation has spread across the United States on the issue of abortion, with some anti-abortion activists praising a supposed treatment which, according to them, would reverse the effects of an abortion pill.
However, medical experts warn of the risks of this potentially fatal pseudo-treatment.
Called “reversal”, it includes taking progesterone for pregnant women who change their minds after taking the abortion pill mifepristone.
“The reversal (of the effects) of the abortion pill can help to reverse”, can we read on the site of the APRN, an anti-abortion organization which praises by this supposed treatment “a second chance at life , just in time”.
The APRN website mentions “examples of success” that cannot be authenticated, with moving testimonies of women who have called the organization’s special number and chosen this “inversion”, thus saving their fetus.
But the APRN does not mention the warning from the American College of Gynecology and Obstetrics (ACOG), a professional association of specialists, which considers this treatment “without scientific basis” and “unethical”.
In 2019, medical trials were conducted by a team of researchers from the University of California at Davis to examine the potential effectiveness of this “inversion” treatment. The trials had to be terminated prematurely after severe internal bleeding in some participants.
“Anecdotal success stories generally do not mention that there is no reliable medical evidence that taking progesterone to reverse the effects of mifepristone increases the chances of a continued pregnancy,” explains AFP. Anicka Slachta, expert at the NewsGuard Disinformation Observatory.
“Omitting this context and presenting (the procedure) of reversal of the effects of the abortion pill as safe and effective can potentially be harmful,” she believes.
Asked by AFP to transmit certain data supporting these remarks, the APRN initially responded, through a communications manager from Heartbeat International, an anti-abortion group that supports the network.
But after asking what AFP intended to highlight in its article, this official stopped the exchanges.
An American health misinformation researcher called the APRN special number, claiming to be a pregnant woman. His interlocutor told him that the organization had managed to save 4,000 children through the “reversal” treatment, citing a success rate of 64 to 68%, a figure also present on the APRN website.
This researcher, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of online harassment, shared the audio files of the conversation with AFP.
When she said on her call to the special number that ACOG did not consider the treatment safe, she was told that this “very pro-abortion” organization could not be trusted, which makes “biased”.
In a report last week, the Center for Combating Online Hate (CCHR) claimed that thousands of “fake clinics” across the United States had spent more than ten million dollars on advertisements on the online hate engine. Google searches for the past two years, in an effort to prevent people “determined to abort” from accessing care.
Many of them, the report points out, were promoting this “reversal” procedure.
According to observations by the NGO Meedan’s eHealth Lab, in the months following the end of the constitutional guarantee for American women to have abortions, the topic of “reversing” the effects of abortion pills was among those having seen an explosion of misinformation around abortion.
“It’s not the fact that someone can change their mind on their own about having an abortion that’s dangerous,” Jenna Sherman, a Meedan official, told AFP.
What is, she says, “is promoting unverified and potentially fatal treatment in order to be anti-abortion at all costs, rather than supporting (the right to) people’s bodily autonomy.” .
21/06/2023 12:08:09 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
