Mifepristone medical abortion has been rapidly accepted in the US since its 2000 approval. Yet the technology has not yet been able fully to deliver on its promise to offer American women a new, widely available alternative to surgical abortion for a number of reasons. Among them are the requirement that women come in to a clinic for a minimum of two visits and the tendency to require pre- and post-procedure sonography as part of treatment. These two factors render medical abortion more burdensome and expensive and limit its provision to practitioners who have sonography machines and the skills to use them.
Gynuity has launched a project to lay the groundwork for decreasing the number of clinic visits and the use of sonography in medical abortion. The project involves more than 4,000 women recruited from four clinics providing medical abortion. The study aims to determine if a simplified approach to medical abortion is as successful as current practice of routine sonography at diagnosing ongoing pregnancies. The study also seeks to discover whether or not symptoms, examination, and a low-sensitivity pregnancy test can, without recourse to sonographic data, in most cases adequately determine duration of pregnancy, likelihood of ectopic pregnancy, and presence of ongoing pregnancy or other post-abortion complications.