WaPo ‘Fact Checker’: Abortion Pill’s High Injury Rate Is No Big Deal Because It Has A Warning Label
The Washington Post’s resident “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler ran circles around himself this week when he tried to undermine the most comprehensive U.S. study on the drug regimen responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions.
Kessler appears to have searched high and low for a crumb of evidence he could use to discredit a recently released Ethics and Public Policy Center study showing 10.9 percent of women who take mifepristone will suffer serious, sometimes life-threatening side effects. Instead, he ended up affirming that the data benchmarks that give the study legitimacy align with those on the mifepristone label.
By definition, a pill that ends at least one human life nearly every time it is ingested and potentially harms more is not “safe and effective.” Yet corporate media mouthpieces like Kessler repeatedly go to bat for the drug and the Democrat-led expansions that contributed to its popularity across the United States.
Even after pummeling EPPC researchers with a literal 20 questions about their data showing mifepristone is more dangerous than previously thought, however, Kessler couldn’t find anything wrong enough with the study to assign it Pinocchios or give his fact-check a snarky, doubt-casting headline. Instead, Kessler resorted to ‘Digging into the math of a study attacking the safety of the abortion pill.”
In the text of the article, the WaPo writer mentioned Sen. Josh Hawley’s article in The Federalist demanding that the FDA not “Ignore Damning New Data On The Dangers Of Mifepristone.” He seems to have skipped over the other four Federalist articles that dive into the methodology and implications of the study, however, to draw his own nothingburger conclusions.
Kessler starts by not so subtly snubbing the study, only referring to it as a “report,” because it did not “undergo a formal external peer review before publication.”
Ethics and Public Policy Center researchers Ryan T. Anderson and Jamie Bryan Hall explained to The Federalist last week that they prioritized publishing an analysis that could be copied over the political peer review process because “the thing that matters most is replicability and peer review doesn’t even guarantee that.”
By releasing the study on their own, Anderson and Hall not only gave the FDA, Planned Parenthood, or even Kessler the opportunity to confirm their findings with their own data reviews, but also successfully avoided a retroactive retraction fight like the one facing Charlotte Lozier Institute after it published three peer-reviewed published studies on the harms of mifepristone.
Yet Kessler continued to nitpick each category of “serious adverse event” outlined by EPPC.
He kicked off the criticism with complaints that the abortion-specific complications category, which made up 5.68 percent of the serious adverse events examined by EPPC, was “vague.”
Chemical abortion is known to harm women in countless ways that are not always neatly sorted into insurance diagnostic codes. As the researchers told Kessler, the wide-ranging list accounts for a myriad of prominent life-threatening complications such as “damage to the woman’s internal organs from the abortion, fetal tissue remaining inside the woman’s uterus after the abortion, kidney failure, as well as life-threatening mental health diagnoses occurring after the abortion.”
Next, Kessler took aim at the emergency room visit rate.
He acknowledged that researchers excluded 72 percent (or 98,483) of the emergency room visits because they were either unrelated to the abortion pill or failed to meet the medically serious threshold outlined by the National Institutes of Health. Yet, Kessler conveniently omitted the fact that emergency room treatment is a category of serious adverse events often referenced in other abortion studies.
“An emergency room visit by itself does not count as a severe adverse event under the FDA definition, and people often go to ERs when they are on Medicaid or do not have a primary care doctor,” Kessler wrote.
In a bizarre and brainless twist, what is clearly a benchmark for legitimacy for the mifepristone study suddenly became Kessler’s primary reason for fact-checking it. Kessler suggested researchers’ conclusion that the rate of life-threatening complications due to mifepristone is 22 times higher than the FDA claims is basically obsolete because their ER visit percentage, 4.7 percent, nearly matched the mifepristone label’s 4.6 percent.
Even if the researchers excluded the ER category altogether, however, EPPC researchers found tens of thousands of harmful outcomes associated with mifepristone.
Kessler tried to downplay those findings by claiming “the most serious problems associated with abortion, such as sepsis and infection, rank rather low,” essentially declaring the roughly 12,500 records of women suffering those incidents don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Kessler, presumably a man who has never endured prolonged bleeding from the nether region, even went so far as to reassure his readers that “normal bleeding occurs with a medication abortion.” The EPPC study, however, explicitly hones in on abnormal bleeding — the same kind of serious, sometimes days-long blood loss described on the mifepristone label.
Kessler also suggests that a patient who was diagnosed as hemorrhaging due to heavy bleeding but recovers fine potentially shouldn’t count as experiencing a “serious adverse event.” Once again, Kessler indicates that because the mifepristone label describes risks such as heavy bleeding or a follow-up abortion, those shouldn’t be considered life-threatening complications in the EPPC study.
“Ectopic pregnancy is supposed to be ruled out before using mifepristone,” Kessler insists.
But it’s not always. Especially if, with permission granted under the Obama and Biden administration’s radical expansions, a doctor states away prescribes a woman mail-order mifepristone after a short virtual visit without confirming the stage or location of the pregnancy.
When you look at the big picture, Kessler’s beef appears to be less with the methodology of the EPPC study and more with the scientists who created the serious adverse event hierarchy they relied on to interpret the insurance data. Yet he repeatedly aimed his fire at the researchers who not only showed their work, but also answered all of his questions without hesitation.
Kessler’s commitment to defending a drug that results in one in 10 women facing serious and sometimes life-threatening complications is odd until you consider his bigger commitment is to being a corporate media hack who runs interference for his preferred political party and its agenda.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
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