Less than a year after losing her daughter Emilia at five days old, Jillian Phillips suffered a miscarriage.
It was Halloween weekend in 2016, and her doctor said she could wait for it to end naturally, have a surgical procedure or take medication. She chose the medicine, passed the remains of her nine-week pregnancy at home and buried them in a memorial garden, near some of Emilia’s ashes.
“Once I found out that the baby inside me was no longer viable, I didn’t want to just walk around carrying the emotional trauma of that,” said Phillips, a 41-year-old single mother of three from North Brookfield, Mass. “You just kind of want it finished. And the medication works pretty quickly.”
But the future of this common miscarriage treatment is in peril. The pill, mifepristone, is used in abortions, making it a target.
Last month, a federal judge in Texas ruled to block mifepristone’s approval by the Food and Drug Administration. The Supreme Court later preserved access to the drug while the lawsuit winds through the courts, a long road that continues with arguments before an appeals court on May 17.
Doctors and patients fear mifepristone could be pulled off the market when the legal wrangling ends. Already, they say, a chilling effect keeps some doctors from prescribing it.
A million U.S. women a year suffer miscarriages, which occur in at least 15% of known pregnancies. Mifepristone was approved in 2000 for early abortions but it is often used “off label” to treat early pregnancy loss or to speed up delivery when a fetus dies later in pregnancy. These uses are so common that U.S. senators urged manufacturer Danco to apply to the FDA to add miscarriage to the label of its drug, Mifeprex.
Denise Harle, an attorney for the group that filed the Texas lawsuit on behalf of anti-abortion doctors and health care organizations, said they aren’t challenging uses of the drug beyond abortion. But legal experts say if it’s taken off the market for its approved use, it wouldn’t be available for pregnancy loss.
Dr. Kristyn Brandi said that would take away “the gold standard of miscarriage management,” the two-drug combination of mifepristone and misoprostol that helps empty the uterus and reduce the chance of infection.
“I offer it to every single patient whose miscarriage I manage,” said Brandi, an OB-GYN in Newark, New Jersey. “There will be a big impact if I am no longer able to use that medication.”
HELP THROUGH THE PAIN
Brandi said medication speeds…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at ABC News: Health…