Pharmacy Mix-Up: Pregnant Woman Given Abortion Drug

Taking any kind of medication while pregnant is scary. I remember being nervous about the anti-convulsants I had to take - drugs that I knew could cause birth defects, but that neither I nor my babies could do without at the time. I remember worrying about the anti-emetics too, and the scare I got over the pharmacist's reaction to the megadoses of folic acid I was prescribed to counterbalance the anti-convulsants.

It was a scary time!

Luckily, my doctors have pretty much always prescribed the right medications in the right doses. And the few times there has been a problem, the pharmacist has caught it & suggested a solution.

Not so for a young pregnant woman in Colorado, who accidentally received and took medication intended for another woman. The pharmacy gave her a drug that could potentially cause a miscarriage, the result of a lapse in following protocols designed to keep us all safe.

Could this happen to you? Of course it could, but there are steps you can take to increase your safety when taking prescription drugs. These steps don't replace the care your doctor and pharmacist should take when giving you medication, but they can help you to catch errors they might otherwise miss, before something tragic happens. Be safe by taking an active role in your own health care.

This content is copyrighted. Please feel free to share by sending others a link to this page, or contact the author about purchasing reprint rights. Thanks to Emily Cahal for the beautiful photo.

Medical Abortion on Law & Order: SVU

If you watch any of the Law & Order shows on a regular basis you have seen the disclaimer that says the characters and plots are works of fiction, but often the episodes do treat controversial legal, social or medical issues that are themselves based in fact. In a recent Law & Order: SVU episode entitled "Gray," Benson and Stabler investigate a college student accused of "gray rape" after he has sex with a drunk co-ed. In the course of the investigation the detectives of the Special Victims Unit discover the same student had also been accused of causing a miscarriage in his pregnant girlfriend against her will. The story is that he was a pre-med student and knew he could induce an abortion without her knowing, by using a homemade lubricant that contained the ulcer medication misoprostol.

So were the writers of this SVU episode using a good bit of creative license, or could a man actually cause his partner to miscarry without her knowing it?

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