A new study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine confirmed previous research and data in finding that abortion in the United States is safe and has rare complications.
From NPR:
The report, called “The Safety and Quality of Abortion Care in the United States,” examined the four major methods used for abortions — medication, aspiration, dilation and evacuation, and induction — and examined women’s care from before they had the procedure through their follow-up care…
But the report did find that state laws and regulations can interfere with safe abortions.
“Abortion-specific regulations in many states create barriers to safe and effective care,” the report says.
[Ned Calonge, co-chair of the committee that authored the study] says those rules often have no basis in medical research.
“There are some requirements that require clinicians to misinform women of the health risks, that say you have to inform a woman that an abortion will increase her risk of breast cancer,” he says.
There is no evidence that breast cancer follows abortion, for example, but five states require doctors to tell women there is a link, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that focuses on reproductive and sexual health.
Pennsylvania has medically unnecessary abortion regulations and requirements on the books.
For example, in 2011, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed Act 122, a bill that requires healthcare facilities that provide abortion care to comply with regulations created for ambulatory surgical centers. The bill was part of a coordinated nationwide effort to reduce women’s access to safe legal abortion by passing regulations that are too logistically or financially burdensome to make, while adding no medical benefit.
A national survey of “informed consent” materials, information healthcare providers are mandated by law to give to patients, conducted by researchers at Rutgers University concluded that 24% of the information in Pennsylvania’s informed consent materials are medically misleading or inaccurate.
Just last week, the National Partnership for Women and Families published the third edition of Bad Medicine, a report that analyzes the rise of laws regulating healthcare and access to healthcare that have no medical benefit.
Evidence suggests that such laws may actually cause medical harm.
“Abortion is safer when it’s performed earlier in gestation,” says Hal Lawrence, the CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. “And so delaying and making people wait and go through hoops of unnecessary, extra procedures does not improve the safety. And actually by having them delay, can actually worsen the safety.”
You can read the report here.
The Women’s Law Project is a public interest law center in Pennsylvania devoted to advancing the rights of women and girls.
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