Abortion Pill Reversal works, Heartbeat International’s Medical Director for the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network told a recent pro-life gathering, and when critics say that it does not, they are being deceitful.
Based upon numerical evidence from a human study, on animal data, human data, and human experience, the APR protocol works, Dr. Brent Boles said.
Boles addressed the Students for Life of America National Pro-Life Summit as part of panel on chemical abortion.
The panel comprised of medical, legal and policy professionals discussed the issue of the fast-growing two-drug abortion regimen that is poised to surpass surgical abortion in the U.S. for the young pro-lifers present.
Boles shared that recently a woman experiencing an ectopic pregnancy did not have the condition diagnosed before she was given chemical abortion pills.
The woman had called her abortion provider back complaining of pain and was told that was normal.
“She took some Tylenol,” Boles said, “until she collapsed in shock from blood loss, because she was bleeding to death in her abdomen from her ruptured tubal pregnancy. She is alive, but the damage that was done caused surgery to be necessary. She has probably lost her fertility and she's only 18 years old.”
Boles explained that if the abortion industry cared about that “they would do things differently.”
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Chemical abortion is a two-drug process. The first drug, mifepristone, destabilizes a woman’s pregnancy by blocking progesterone, the natural hormone in her body needed to sustain pregnancy. A day or two after she takes the first pill, she takes the second, misoprostol, which causes her to go into labor and deliver her deceased child.
Relaxed FDA safety protocols sanctioned by the federal government along with illicit pills sold on-line mean that women seeking abortion are not receiving the medical oversight necessary to best ensure their safety. The example offered by Boles of the undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy is one of the possible complications that can occur when a woman is not examined by a doctor prior to being given chemical abortion pills.
Conversely, Abortion Pill Reversal entails prescribing progesterone to counter that first abortion drug, assisting the pregnant mother’s body to do what it naturally would. The protocol is an updated application of a decades-old treatment to combat miscarriage, and is administered by the Abortion Pill Rescue Network (APRN), a group of roughly 1,000 medical providers and pregnancy help organizations worldwide that is managed by Heartbeat International.
If a woman takes the first abortion pill and regrets her decision, and she acts soon enough, she may be able to save her unborn child through APR. Statistics show that to date 3,000 lives and counting have been saved thanks to the APRN.
Abortion proponents like to defame APR, as it presents and antidote to abortion and demonstrates that women can regret their abortion.
“You will hear from the abortion industry, from pro-abortion politicians and from their allies in the media, and in the American College of OB GYNs, that there is no credible evidence that Abortion Pill Reversal works,” Boles told the pro-life gathering. “That progesterone can’t be used to reverse the action of a medication abortion. And that is a flat out lie and they know it.”
There are four different avenues of evidence, Boles explained.
Number one, he said, every medical student in the first one to two years of medical school takes of some 25 credit hours, a semester of advanced basic sciences. Those sciences include the courses of biochemistry, physiology, and pharmacology. All three of those courses that medical students must take and pass to advance and work toward becoming a physician teach the concepts that support the idea of reversing the action of mifepristone with progesterone, he said.
He went on to describe in detail what takes place when the chemical abortion drug blocks the progesterone.
And two days later, when she takes the drug to induce labor, she is at home with no epidural, no pain medicine, and frequently women are traumatized because they often see their baby.
“That’s when women realize, that’s not a clump of cells, that’s my baby,” Boles said.
Boles said that's why Planned Parenthood tells women when they feel like the baby is about to come out, to sit on the toilet, flush and don't look.
Supplementing with high dose, natural progesterone is a concept supported by those basic sciences in medicine, biochemistry, physiology, and pharmacology, he said.
Boles detailed how two individual physicians, George Delgado, and Matthew Harrison, one on the east coast, one on the west coast, at about the same time were both approached by patients of theirs who had just taken mifepristone and had changed their mind.
“They realized they'd made a mistake as soon as they took it,” said Boles. “And they called their doctors and said, ‘What can we do?”
And both of them independently of one another, started thinking, about the biochemistry of how this works.
“Okay, it blocks progesterone, so why don't we just try and give in an extra progesterone?” Boles recounted, and the first successful reversal is now a young woman had celebrated her 17th birthday last year.
The doctors began thinking about this how to study this and be certain this wasn't just a fluke.
So, Delgado spearheaded an effort to have multiple providers in multiple locations look at different ways of administering the progesterone, Boles said. And they analyzed initially more than 750 patients. A couple-hundred ended up dropping out of the study or didn’t follow up.
“But they were able to analyze the data for more than 500 of these patients,” said Boles.
And if you assume that just taking mifepristone and not taking the misoprostol that it's going to kill the baby somewhere between 75 and 90% of the time - if you don't take progesterone - then when you do take progesterone, the study shows that 68% of the time you're going to have a result that is a living baby.”
There were multiple groups with different ways of administering the progesterone in that study of 550 some patients, he said.
The group that had the highest success rate is what was considered the high dose oral protocol, Boles said, “and that's what we use at the Abortion Pill Reversal Network.”
“The women take the high dose of oral progesterone, a really high dose for the first three days, and then a moderately high dose until they finish the first trimester,” he said. “Sixty-eight percent of the time it works.”
“So, the abortion industry can't criticize those numbers,” said Boles. “So, they criticize the methodology of the study.”
“It is effective,” he said. “Those women did not have an increased risk of complications. Those babies did not have an increased risk of birth defects.”
“And in fact, the women who completed the progesterone in the study were the baseline risk, in our population of preterm labor and delivery is about 10%, only 3% of those patients delivered premature.
“So, Abortion Pill Reversal, progesterone, actually improves the chances that the woman will not have a premature delivery,” Boles stated. “So, there are benefits, outside of the obvious benefit of saving a baby and saving the mother from having lost a child that she decided she wanted.”
Brent Boles, M.D.; Abortion Pill Reversal Network, Kevin Theirot; Alliance Defending Freedom;
and Kristi Hamrick, Students for Life/Lisa Bourne
The third line of evidence deals with animal studies. Boles told said there's extremely good animal data that shows that reversal works, citing a study from Japan in the late 1980s while mifepristone was being developed. The doctor Japan studied pregnant rats, giving half of the rats mifepristone and half of the rats, he gave mifepristone and progesterone.
Of the rats that did not get progesterone, 67% of the rat embryos died. And when they dissected those rats and studied them afterwards, Boles explained, there were microscopic changes in the uterus and the ovaries of every one of the rats.
On the other hand, of the group that got progesterone, none of the rat embryos died.
“One-hundred percent of the rat embryos that were given progesterone survived,” said Boles. “And when those uteruses and ovaries were looked at under the microscope, they didn't have any of the microscopic changes.”
“So, you have the numerical evidence,” he said, “and you have the pathological evidence from the animal study.”
Then third is the human data.
“Right now, we know that since Heartbeat International took over the Abortion Pill Rescue Network, and has tried to expand it and grow it, 3000 babies have been delivered,” Boles said.
“We get 300 calls a month from women seeking to reverse the action of their progesterone. More than half of them go ahead and decide to follow through with it after we explain it to them,” he said. “So, every day babies are being born in the United States who, whose medication abortion was reversed with progesterone.”
Then, he said, there is the human as related to the providers who believe in this, of which there are more than a thousand, who volunteer their time for free to be on call as a provider of prescription services.
“So, you've got biochemical, physiological, pharmacological evidence,” said Boles. “You've got numerical evidence from the human study, you've got animal data and you've got the human experience.”
“Abortion Pill Reversal works,” Boles said in conclusion. “And when they say that it doesn't, they are aligned to your face.”
Editor's note: Heartbeat International manages the Abortion Pill Rescue® Network and Pregnancy Help News.
