Early Options: Home

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The FDA approval of mifepristone offers women and health care providers another early abortion option. The National Abortion Federation (NAF) is the professional association of abortion providers in North America, and the only organization accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) that provides an ongoing program of accredited continuing medical education exclusively in abortion care.

As such, NAF has developed comprehensive educational materials and programs to provide health care professionals with the information necessary to safely and effectively offer medical abortion to their patients seeking abortion services. This Web-based CME activity is one of the many resources in NAF's Early Options Medical Education Series. It consists of the following five modules:

Module 1 - Pharmacological Approaches to Early Abortion

Module 2 - Expected Side Effects and Management of Complications in Medical Abortion

Module 3 - Counseling for Medical Abortion

Module 4 - The Role of Ultrasound, hCG Assays, and Clinical Assessment in Medical Abortion

Module 5 - Medical Abortion Service Delivery

A Note about Terminology

The emergence of abortion techniques using regimens of mifepristone, methotrexate, misoprostol, and/or other agents in the 1990s precipitated extensive discussion about the best, most accurate term to collectively describe these methods. "Medical abortion" emerged as the most widely acceptable descriptor for those methods when used in the first trimester, generally through 63 days gestation, and there is now a wide body of published literature employing this term. Discussion and research continues about alternative phraseology, and some in the field have begun to introduce the term "medication abortion" in training materials and patient education materials.¹ However, in this program, we employ the commonly accepted language "medical abortion" to refer to the family of safe and effective drug-based methods for pregnancy termination generally in the first 63 days gestation.

Before proceeding to the program modules, it is necessary to review required continuing medical education (CME) information.

¹ Weitz TA, Foster A, Ellertson C, Grossman D, Stewart FH. "Medical" and "surgical" abortion: Rethinking the modifiers. Contraception 2004; 69: 77-78.

Proceed to Continuing Medical Education Information.