Study: 83 Percent of ER Visits Due to Drug-Induced Abortions Miscoded as ’Miscarriages’

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. (Read more from “Study: 83 Percent of ER Visits Due to Drug-Induced Abortions Miscoded as ’Miscarriages’” HERE)

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