Expert answers: How to use medication for medical abortion?

Medical abortion is a method of abortion that has been developed in the past decade. The purpose of terminating pregnancy is achieved by taking drugs designated by the state. The principle is that the drugs taken interfere with the normal physiological process of pregnancy and allow the pregnant woman to abort on her own. Its advantages are that it does not require intrauterine operation and the pain is less than traditional surgery. However, the scope of application of medical abortion is narrow, the time required is longer, the success rate is lower than that of surgery, and the bleeding after abortion is more and lasts longer. For those who fail medical abortion, surgery is still required.

The more common and mature drugs for medical abortion are prostaglandin (PG) preparations, mainly PGE and PGF and their analogs. They can be taken orally or placed in the vagina to work. The method is simple and only needs 1-2 times of medication to work. The drugs do not enter the uterine cavity, so there is less chance of uterine cavity infection. There is no discomfort and complication of surgical abortion, so there are no serious side effects, and the success rate is over 92%.

The advantage of medical abortion is that it is convenient and easy to perform, but its long-term side effects still need to be further observed. Its disadvantage is that if the patient is insensitive to the drug and the medical abortion fails, an artificial abortion operation must be performed to leave the damaged pregnancy to continue to develop; medical abortion sometimes causes incomplete abortion, and some patients sometimes need emergency curettage due to heavy bleeding. Menstruation will resume about one month after the medical abortion expel the pregnancy products; if the pregnancy products have not been expelled for more than a week, or if the pregnancy products have been expelled but the vaginal bleeding is excessive and the bleeding has not stopped after two weeks, the patient should go to the hospital for a follow-up visit and a B-ultrasound examination. The doctor will treat the patient with uterine cleaning, anti-infection, uterotonics and hemostatics according to the different conditions.