The likelihood that a woman seeking emergency care for a potentially life-threatening complication following an abortion will have her abortion misclassified as a miscarriage has increased significantly over the last decade, a new peer-reviewed study from the Charlotte Lozier Institute found.
The study’s nine authors warn that more misclassification, often due to deliberate concealment of a drug-induced abortion, could deprive women of the emergent care they need for the serious adverse events linked to abortions, more specifically those involving mifepristone.
Researchers interested in how hospitals handle treatment for women who experience complications after abortions examined nearly 29,000 anonymized ER Medicaid claims ranging from 2016 to 2021 among women who had chemically or surgically ended a pregnancy in the last 30 days. They determined that 83.5 percent of the abortion drug-induced ER visits during that period were miscoded, often as miscarriage.
That figure not only represented a steep increase in miscodes from the 2004 to 2015 data, but also confirmed that “visits following chemical abortion are significantly more likely to be incorrectly coded as following spontaneous abortion than are visits following surgical abortion.”
Those post-mifepristone ER visits that were miscoded were also 50 percent more likely to be severe than vists that were coded properly.
“While miscodes remain more prevalent following medical abortion, miscodes following surgical abortion have grown approximately twice as much between the two observation periods as a percentage of both all-cause and abortion-related visits,” the study added.
While the reason for miscodes is not explicitly clear, the researchers noted that “women are often advised to misrepresent their recent abortion as a miscarriage when seeking treatment for complications in the emergency department.”
“Consequently, the ED doctor is likely to misattribute the complication (e.g., heavy bleeding) to a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage,” the study noted.
Abortion giant Planned Parenthood reassures women that “no one — including nurses or doctors — can tell if you’ve taken abortion pills.” Abortion ally American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) similarly warns its members against asking too many questions when they suspect a woman is seeking care after a pill-induced abortion.
“Questions and evaluation should be based on the patient’s presenting symptoms in the context of a recent pregnancy but do not need to delve into the circumstances that lead them to seek care,” ACOG’s self-managed abortion committee statement suggests.
Purposeful coverup of an abortion or not, researchers warned that such a high prevalence in miscoded post-abortion visits could “also result in improper care, which may contribute to an increased level of morbidity, such that the miscoding of the post-abortion complication may itself be a risk factor.”
“When abortion-related emergencies are disguised as miscarriages, it impairs a doctor’s ability to make informed, evidence-based decisions. That isn’t just a documentation error—it’s a public health crisis,” Charlotte Lozier Institute Vice President and Director of Data Analytics Dr. James Studnicki said in a statement.
The researchers’ conclusions tracks with another recently released study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which found that the rate of life-threatening complications due to mifepristone is at least 22 times higher than what the FDA and the abortion drug’s manufacturer suggest. The serious adverse events listed in that study range from emergency room visits to hemorrhage, sepsis, infection, and/or follow-up surgeries for the women who had taken the abortion drug within the 45 days of those complications.
Another Charlotte Lozier Institute study published last week also confirmed that that the abortion lobby’s attempt to paint mifepristone as less harmful than Tylenol is rooted in activism instead of science.