OPINION:
How many cases does it take before we take notice, and what happens when no data is being kept?
That’s what’s happening with the number of deaths from medical abortion. No data is available on fatal adverse events related to mifepristone, the first of two drugs in the medical abortion protocol.
So I was shocked when I recently found and read a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine article titled “Fatal Toxic Shock Syndrome Associated with Clostridium Sordellii After Medical Abortion.” It examines the medical records of four previously healthy women in California who died after medical abortions with mifepristone and misoprostol. The drugs were prescribed by doctors according to the then-existing protocols: three doctor visits, blood work, gestation of no more than seven weeks, etc. What was stunning was how the women followed the protocol — and died anyway.
What these women (and obviously their doctors) didn’t know was that, “by blocking both progesterone and glucocorticoid receptors,” mifepristone administration leads to the “disintegration of the body’s defense system necessary to prevent the endometrial spread of C. sordellii infection,” according to another 2005 publication, “Pathophysiology of mifepristone-induced septic shock due to Clostridium sordellii.”
This spore-forming, gram-positive, anaerobic bacterium proliferates in the uterus and releases toxins that enter the bloodstream after medical abortion, and it can lead to severe and sudden “lethal septic shock.” That’s right: Toxic shock syndrome is back.
When women who develop this deadly condition are tested, no organisms are evident in either their blood or vaginal cultures in spite of elevated white blood cell counts. There is no fever and no rash, just the virtually unrecognized toxins doing their work to leach fluid from the blood vessels into the areas around the lungs and heart. These organs try desperately to continue their mission of oxygenating and pumping the ever-thickening blood, but to no avail. These women die about 12 hours after admission to the hospital, no matter what the doctors do.
The aforementioned publications came out 20 years ago, and the autopsies were ordered by the Department of Health and Human Services. Why was this not front-page news in 2005? Why was mifepristone not pulled from the market immediately?
Who sat on the results of these studies, and why?
ROSEMARY ANTUNES
Front Royal, Virginia
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