Digging into the math of a study attacking the safety of the abortion pill

The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that says it opposes “the extreme progressive agenda while building consensus of conservatives,” recently issued a report on a key abortion medication, mifepristone, that it says raises questions about its safety. After analyzing insurance claims for more than 865,000 prescribed mifepristone abortions, the group said it had determined that almost 11 percent of women experienced a “serious adverse event,” much higher than an overall 0.5 percent rate found in clinical studies.

That headline number led Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri) to declare that the abortion pill is dangerous. “Those are astounding, jaw-dropping numbers, and they have been largely hidden from the public,” he said in an opinion article in the Federalist. An adverse health event, he noted, is “a major, potentially life-threatening medical disaster. We’re talking about things like sepsis, infection, and hemorrhaging, the kind of things that land you in an ER.”