Researchers warn that misclassification could deprive women of the emergent care they need for the serious adverse events linked to abortion. //

Researchers interested in how hospitals handle treatment for women who experience complications after abortions examined nearly 29,000 anonymized ER Medicaid claims ranging from 2016 to 2021 among women who had chemically or surgically ended a pregnancy in the last 30 days. They determined that 83.5 percent of the abortion drug-induced ER visits during that period were miscoded, often as miscarriage.

That figure not only represented a steep increase in miscodes from the 2004 to 2015 data, but also confirmed that “visits following chemical abortion are significantly more likely to be incorrectly coded as following spontaneous abortion than are visits following surgical abortion.”

Those post-mifepristone ER visits that were miscoded were also 50 percent more likely to be severe than vists that were coded properly. //

While the reason for miscodes is not explicitly clear, the researchers noted that “women are often advised to misrepresent their recent abortion as a miscarriage when seeking treatment for complications in the emergency department.”

“Consequently, the ED doctor is likely to misattribute the complication (e.g., heavy bleeding) to a spontaneous abortion or miscarriage,” the study noted.