Las Vegas Woman Loses Pregnancy After CVS Mistakenly Prescribes Abortion Pill

A Las Vegas woman was met with the heartbreaking reality that she’d lost her embryos after her in-vitro fertilization (IVF) medication was accidentally switched with an abortion pill by two local CVS technicians.

Timika Thomas and her husband made the choice to expand their family of six in 2019. After troubles conceiving, and a pair of ectopic pregnancies, the couple turned to IVF as an alternative, yet expensive, option. After having two eggs placed inside of her, Thomas was prescribed medicine that would send signals to her body to produce the hormones needed for a successful pregnancy.

“You have to make yourself think it’s pregnant,” Thomas said. “We’re taking a lot of supplements to make our bodies think it’s pregnant.”

The mother of four took her prescription to be filled at a CVS in North Las Vegas, but after taking the medicine as instructed, she immediately grew concerned.

“I started cramping really bad,” she said. “It was extreme. It was painful.” Thomas decided to look into the medicine she was given and discovered that she’d been prescribed the medical abortion pill, Misoprostol. “They just killed my baby,” she said. “Both my babies, because I transferred two embryos.”

Two technicians and two pharmacists were responsible for the fatal mishap, as reported by 8 News Now. The error was made in three parts: medicine incorrectly entered into the system by a technician who failed to cross reference for clarity, a lack of recognition of the error by one physician, and a failure by another to consult with Thomas about her prescribed medication.

“It [the error] would have been caught because then they would have had to have the medicine in their hand,” Thomas said. “And they would have said, ‘Oh, this is Misoprostol or Cytotek, have you taken this before?’ And I would have said ‘no.’”

Thomas appeared before the Nevada State Board of Pharmacy in September and her testimony resulted in both physicians being fined along with having their licenses temporarily suspended. The board also fined CVS $10,000 for liability. Both pharmacists apologized for their mistakes; however, Thomas has been left to deal with the grief of losing her last opportunity to expand her family.

“All I got was a sorry,” she said. “It will never be good enough.”