Missouri is suing Planned Parenthood for allegedly lying to patients about the risks of the abortion medication mifepristone.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) filed a lawsuit Wednesday in Jefferson City arguing that Planned Parenthood’s claims that the abortion drug is safer than many other medications including penicillin and Tylenol are untrue and violate the state’s consumer-protection law.
Bailey claims that the nonprofit organization has lied about the safety of the drug to “cut costs and boost revenue,” according to the lawsuit. The complaint also requests a court order to stop Planned Parenthood from “continuing to promote the falsehoods,” in Missouri and for the organization to pay more than $1.8 million in civil penalties.
The attorney general’s office is also asking for the organization to be fined $1,000 in damages to every woman in the Show-Me State that has received abortion medication through one of is providers in the past five years.
On top of this, it asks that the organization reimburse the state for Medicaid and other tax-payer-funded emergency care provided to people who suffered complications after taking mifepristone.
“We are going to hold these charlatans and death dealers accountable,” Bailey wrote in a post on social platform X about the suit.
The crux of the lawsuit’s argument comes down to a disagreement over how many people suffer adverse health effects after taking mifepristone.
On the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) warning label for the drug, it states that between 2.9 percent and 4.6 percent of people who have taken it along with misoprostol report visiting an emergency room afterwards.
There are two drugs typically needed for a medication abortion: mifepristone and misoprostol. Mifepristone stops the pregnancy from growing while misoprostol induces cramping and bleeding to empty the uterus.
More than 100 scientific studies across decades have looked at the efficacy and safety of the pair and all of them have found the drugs safe for use, according to an analysis from The New York Times.
Bailey’s lawsuit claims that the FDA’s label is inaccurate and that “recent studies” suggest the complication rate is much higher. The lawsuit does not cite a specific study to back up its claim and a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not answer questions from The Hill about what data was used to back up its claim.
The lawsuit does echo findings outlined in a deeply flawed study published in April by the conservative think tank the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) which states that after analyzing more than 865,000 prescribed mifepristone abortions, it determined that nearly 11 percent of women experienced a “serious adverse event.”
That’s nearly 22 times higher than what the FDA reports.
Bailey’s lawsuit references a “dataset” of more than 850,000 mifepristone abortions that identified “serious adverse events” in more than 10 percent of women who took the drug.
Medical researchers have criticized the EPPC study for its lack of transparency and for flaws in its methodology. One of the largest hiccups of the study is its inclusion of emergency room visits as one of the “serious adverse events” that can happen after taking the abortion pill, health experts say.
The EPPC study breaks down “serious adverse events” into categories including hemorrhage, sepsis and emergency room visits. It looks as if emergency room visits were counted as adverse events even if health care workers determined the patient was healthy and released them without treatment.
Some people might go to an emergency room after taking the abortion pill to confirm that they are no longer pregnant or to make sure that the bleeding they are experiencing is normal, two principal research scientists at the Guttmacher Institute noted in an op-ed last month.
The lawsuit is the latest attack from conservative lawmakers on Planned Parenthood. Under the GOP’s new tax and spending bill, the organization would lose its ability to receive Medicaid reimbursements for health services it provides for one year.
The nonprofit sued the Trump administration over the provision and a federal judge granted the organization’s request for a temporary injunction earlier this week.
The Hill has reached out to Planned Parenthood Federation of America for comment.
