Besides knowing that the woman getting the procedure is in ordinary good health, we have to make sure that the woman is not further in pregnancy than our experience and equipment are adequate for.
This is an incredibly safe procedure, when it’s done by women who have worked together, and who have done uterine size checks on one another on a regular basis who are reasonably sure that someone is not too much further along than her uterus feels like.
It has happened, not in our group, but in groups that didn’t follow our protocol, that they have found they were dealing with a pregnancy that was further than they realized. In the instances where we were aware that this had happened, usually the group the woman needed to go to a hospital to get the procedure finished using instruments and skills that they didn’t have. Medically, it turned out fine, but on a couple of occasions, the person who did the menstrual extraction was investigated for practicing medicine without a license and one was charged. No one that we’re aware of has been actually prosecuted.