According to a New England Journal of Medicine study, the pill also did not pose any extra risk of premature delivery and delivering babies with low birth weight. The study, which is considered the best study to date of the impact of this newer abortion method on future pregnancies, used a national abortion registry to identify all women in Denmark who had abortions between 1999 and 2004.
The study results concluded that there was no difference between the frequencies of tubal or ectopic pregnancies, rates of miscarriage, early deliveries and low birth weight babies in women who opted for either method of abortion.
Medical abortions generally involves a woman terminating her pregnancy by taking one tablet of mifespristone, formerly known as RU-486. It is followed by about four misoprostol pills a day or two later. The two subsequent pills first destabilize the connecting tissue between an embryo and the uterus, and then expel the embryo from the uterus.
The abortion pill was approved for use in the United States for medical abortions in 2000, and European countries approved it years earlier. Today, an estimated 8 to 10 percent of the roughly 1.3 million abortions in America are done using the pills.
