Pregnant Woman Given Abortion Pill by Mistake; Nevada CVS Fined $10,000
A CVS pharmacy in Nevada that gave a pregnant woman the abortion drug misoprostol when she had been prescribed a fertility treatment has been fined $10,000 and two of its pharmacists have been penalized.
The penalties were issued last month for the incident that occurred in 2019 when the woman, Timika Thomas, a mother of four at the time, was undergoing in vitro fertilization (IVF) in an attempt to have another child.
She had just had two human embryos placed in her womb when the Las Vegas CVS dispensed the wrong prescription.
Thomas, 38, told CNA on Monday that when she realized what had happened, her first thought was, “They killed my babies.”
Abortion Drug Prescribed in Error
Two pharmacists, along with two technicians at the CVS, committed a series of mistakes that led to the abortion drug mistakenly being given to the patient, according to documents filed with the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy.
In vitro fertilization is a process by which a human embryo is created in a lab by fertilizing mature eggs from a woman’s ovaries with a man’s sperm, according to the Mayo Clinic. That embryo is then placed inside a woman in hopes that they will implant and develop fully. The Catholic Church teaches that IVF is immoral (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 2376-2377).
Thomas, 34 at the time, had two embryos transferred into her uterus on July 23, 2019. Before the operation, her doctor prescribed the drug Endometrin, which contains progesterone, to aid the procedure, according to her 2019 complaint filed with the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy.
During IVF, progesterone is used to help support implantation of the embryo because the process inhibits the body’s natural ability to produce progesterone, according to Washington University School of Medicine’s Fertility & Reproductive Medicine Center.
