Arizona Abortion Law Pushes Boundaries of What Providers Must Tell Patients
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Source: US News
Arizona Abortion Law Pushes Boundaries of What Providers Must Tell Patients
In a sea of abortion counseling requirements, is Arizona’s reversal mandate a bridge too far?
By Tierney Sneed
April 1, 2015 | 5:45 p.m. EDT
An unprecedented abortion law signed by Arizona's governor this week would require providers to inform patients that a drug treatment to end pregnancy may be reversed midway through – a mandate pro-abortion rights activists are denouncing as the latest effort by a state to employ questionable science in a politically motivated effort to discourage women from undergoing the procedure.
Under the law, women seeking medication abortions in Arizona will hear they may be able to reverse it between the first step of the process, a dose of Mifepristone – the medical abortion drug also known as RU-486 – and the second, another drug administered two to three days later. The procedure purported to do so has women take shots of progesterone to counteract the effects of the abortion drug, which blocks the hormone.
“There’s a lot of things we do in medicine that the antidote is just the opposite of the drugs you gave,” says Dr. Allan Sawyer, an Arizona OB/GYN and abortion opponent who testified on behalf of the proposal. “So I'm very comfortable in giving natural progesterone to reverse the side effects of RU-486.”
The law’s advocates recount an anecdote in which a woman who decided she wanted to reverse her medication abortion after the first drug was only able to find Sawyer by Googling “abortion pill reversal” and contacting him through a website.
Read more: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/04/01/arizona-abortion-law-pushes-boundaries-of-what-providers-must-tell-patients
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