A new report claims that abortion pill complications are underreported, as new data show that many more women suffer side effects than previously thought. 

This comes as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told state lawmakers this week that the FDA would conduct a new review of the safety of the abortion pill protocol. 

The pro-life advocacy group National Right to Life (NRTL) released a report Monday, titled “Missed, Misclassified, and Minimized: Why Abortion Pill Complications Are Underreported.”

In a statement about the report’s release, NRTL President Carol Tobias warned that “Women are being harmed, and the dangers are being ignored or hidden.” 

Authored by NRTL Director of Education and Research Randall O’Bannon, the report builds on the findings of an Ethics and Public Policy Center analysis of 865,000 insurance claims that found 11% of women who took the abortion pills experienced “serious adverse events,” including hemorrhaging and infection.

NRTL contrasts these statistics with those of FDA trials that found 0.5% of women who take the abortion pills suffer from serious complications.

O’Bannon attributes the underreporting of complications to three main factors: women being encouraged to conceal their abortions during emergency room visits, the failure of the media to cover such cases, and what he described as “abortion industry spin.”

“Women are made to think that revealing their use of [abortion pills] will expose them to possible prosecution or at least exposure to their friends or relatives and advocates say this may make them reluctant to seek needed treatment," read the report.

The report highlighted a statement featured on the pro-abortion advocacy website Aid Access advising women that they “do not have to tell the medical staff that you tried to induce an abortion; you can tell them that you had a spontaneous miscarriage” because “the symptoms of a miscarriage and an abortion with pills are exactly the same and the doctor will not be able to see or test for any evidence of an abortion, as long as the pills have completely dissolved.” 

“The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) advises that Ob-Gyns ‘should not report pregnancy outcomes unless legally compelled to do so,’” the report stated.

“ACOG tells health care professionals that even if a patient discloses their attempted chemical abortion ‘documenting and reporting of the information can cause harm to the patient as well as the health care professional involved in the patient’s care.’” 

Addressing media coverage of abortion pill complications, the report maintains that whenever “the media has talked to a few of these women or published their stories describing the agony of the process and the trauma of losing their children, their experiences are generally downplayed or dismissed as transitory or even blamed on pro-life laws or policies.”

O’Bannon accuses many in the media of “blindly accepting the claims and spin of the abortion industry." 

The report also asserts that “abortion researchers minimize the numbers and seriousness of the complications experienced by users of [the abortion pill]” by classifying most of them as minor rather than major.

O’Bannon also cited a 2015 study of emergency room visits by California Medi-Cal abortion patients conducted by the University of California San Francisco, classifying “major complications” as “serious unexpected adverse events requiring hospital admission, surgery, or blood transfusion” as an example of this phenomenon. 

On the other hand, complications including “diagnosis of cervical injury requiring suture repair” as well as hemorrhaging, infections and “uterine perforations” were classified as minor in the study. O’Bannon noted that the takeaway finding of that study is that only 0.31% of women experience adverse events after taking the abortion pill. However, when including both major and minor complications, that figure rises to 5.19%. 

The publication of the NRTL report comes as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has vowed to conduct a review of abortion pills in light of the EPPC report in response to requests from pro-life advocacy groups.