This story was originally reported by Shefali Luthra of The 19th. Meet Shefali and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Using flawed studies and scientific journal publications, abortion opponents are building a body of research meant to question the safety of the abortion pill mifepristone, a key target for the movement.

The effort comes as federal officials have expressed a willingness to revisit the drug’s approval — and potentially impose new restrictions on a medication used in the vast majority of abortions.

Mainstream medical researchers have criticized the studies, highlighting flaws in their methodology and — in the case of one paper published by the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) — lack of transparency about the data used to suggest mifepristone is unsafe. The vast body of research shows that the drugs used in medication abortion, mifepristone and misoprostol, are safe and effective in terminating a pregnancy.

“There’s a proliferation of anti-abortion propaganda right now. I think it is a coordinated attack on mifepristone,” said Ushma Upadhyay, an associate professor at the University of California, San Francisco who studies medication abortion.

Released in April, the EPPC paper suggests that mifepristone results in serious adverse events for 1 in 10 patients — substantially higher than the widely accepted figure of .3 percent complication rate most research has attributed to the pill. The paper appears to count what other researchers say are non-threatening events, such as requiring follow-up care to complete the abortion, or visiting an emergency room within 45 days of an abortion — even if the patient did not end up requiring emergency care — as serious adverse effects. That paper also did not go through peer review, a standard process for scientific research in which other scholars review a study’s findings and methodology before it can be published.

Another paper, a commentary piece published this week in the journal BioTech, challenges the commonly cited statistic that mifepristone has a lower complication rate than acetaminophen, or Tylenol, tracing the history of the comparison and arguing that it is mathematically flawed. The paper’s author,........

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