Slate’s Amanda Marcotte looks at the anti-abortion bill that is awaiting Gov. Doug Ducey’s signature. Marcotte zeroes in on the provision that requires doctors to tell patients they can reverse a medication abortion:
Anti-choicers, backed by one particularly vocal doctor named George Delgado, are claiming that you can “reverse” medication abortions. A woman having a medication abortion takes two pill doses, one of mifepristone and then another of misoprostol. Proponents of “abortion reversal” would like you to believe it’s common for women to take the first dose and become wracked with guilt, desperate to save her pregnancy. To help these women, Delgado gives the woman progesterone shots, supposedly in an effort to reverse the effects of the mifepristone.
The problem is it’s almost certainly quackery. Mifepristone is not enough on its own to terminate a pregnancy some of the time, so you’re not “reversing” the abortion so much as interrupting the process before it’s complete. The progesterone shots reverse nothing—they are medically unnecessary theater, designed to portray anti-choicers as conquering heroes rescuing pregnant maidens from the clutches of abortionists. There’s no evidence of much demand from women to interrupt their abortions, and in the rare circumstances that someone is seized by regret, all she needs to do is contact her regular doctor about stopping the pills.
Forcing doctors to “inform” patients about an intervention that isn’t medically useful and isn’t really in demand serves no other purpose but to inject anti-choice histrionics into what is already a stressful situation for many patients. You should be able to get through an abortion without having to indulge a right-wing delusion.
Read Marcotte’s deeper look at the claim that abortions can be reversed on Slate.
This article appears in Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2015.
So glad that you saw Marcotte’s work on Slate also. Everyone who cares about women’s health needs to read this!
If a woman needs an abortion due to medical reasons or due to rape then an abortion should be covered but if the woman just wants an abortion just because she does not want the baby then she should pay for it herself. There are many birth control choices available to chose from that are suppose to be ‘free’ on the ACA or what ever insurance you may have. Once you start an abortion there is no turning back.
At least Arizona legislature is making the national news again. Huff Post has a story too. It really is offensive that our legislators feel the need to tell our physicians to tell their female patients about “treatments” that are not evidence-based medicine.
Forcing a doctor to tell a medical lie to a patient is criminal, isn’t it?
it seems you just need votes, money, self-righteousness and a fair amount of delusion to get a license to practice medicine in Arizona…
The “Right to Birth” party is at it again, forcing Cathi Herrod’s view onto every woman in Arizona and adding a dose of legally required bullsh*t to an already difficult decision. Are they spiking the water coolers the Republicans use at the State House with some sort of mind-eroding drug that makes them incredibly susceptible to really bad and tremendously stupid ideas?
republicans chafe at being Constitutionally micro-managed by the Feds but are happy to micro-manage your sex life for ya’ using the guidelines provided by their perverse misinterpretations of self-contradictory, fictional sky-god myths…
Life in a red state…
How are so many so-called conservatives here against abortions? These are the same people who rant and rave on “wasteful” education spending.
Hey geniuses, the less children there are, the less you supposedly have to “pay” for education.
Who elects all these crazy people to control our government. They don’t care about the safety of roads, bottle/can return policy. They care less about a state that is clean of trash. All they care about are more guns, and women right to chose. When will voters wake up and elect those that care about all the people and the entire state. The Republicans hate progress. They prefer living back in the 1800s. When will they ban cars, trains, planes? Still waiting for those bills to pass.
As you view the controlling government in Phoenix, many are crazy, radical women. They are the ones to be afraid of. They are the real ISIS of the state. Most are senile and uneducated, can’t get a job outside of government.