It sounded like a simple, innocuous safety regulation than Doctors administering medication to end a pregnancy would have adhere to a protocol set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

But according to the new study, the effect of the law in one state, Ohio, was actually to increase the number of complications women getting abortions experienced.

Ohio passed the medication abortion law in 2004  which was among a half dozen similar ones nationwide and came from the playbook of anti-abortion activists.

Even though abortion providers said that the FDA protocol, set in 2000, was outdated and the clinical trials came up with a safer regimen for the pill that involved a lower, cheaper dose and a longer window of use, the law finally went into effect in 2011.

Now, a new study, published in the Public Library of Science jounral PLoS Medicine and conducted by researchers at the University of San Francisco's Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health, that has found that patients suffered a dramatic increase in side effects compared to the time before the law.

The study's lead author, Ushma Upadhyay, said in an interview, "It is ironic because it was passed with the stated intention of protecting women's health. Our evidence showed that women's health was really compromised because of this law,"

According to records kept by Ohio abortion clinics surveyed by the researchers, "women who had medication abortions in the post-law period had three times the odds of requiring at least one additional treatment compared to women in the pre-law period."

By Prakriti Neogi