Doctors Right, Politicians Wrong about prescribing Abortion Drugs

http://jezebel.com/doctors-right-politicians-wrong-on-prescribing-abortio-1681898047?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

Hey, wow, who could've predicted this: a new study on mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs taken together to induce an abortion, shows that it's perfectly safe to use a lower dosage of the drugs than the FDA recommends. Doctors have been saying that since at least 2001. It's almost as though their medical training gives them a special understanding of how drugs work?

The study, released in the journal Contraception and which we saw via Think Progress, is important because for years, anti-abortion politicians have been passing laws to restrict RU-486, the drug that combines a dose of mifepristone and a dose of misoprostol, to its FDA-approved use, rather than allowing doctors to prescribe a lower-safer dose off-label or let them prescribe it slightly later in pregnancy than the FDA guidelines currently dictate. (Arizona, for example, wants to make RU-486 illegal after the seventh week of pregnancy, though most studies show it's effective for about nine weeks, a very big differenced when you're dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.)

The Contraception study concludes that the drug is safe through 63 days (nine weeks) of pregnancy, adding that their research "contributes to the existing evidence against restrictions requiring use of the FDA-approved regimen in the United States."