Twelve years ago today, the Clinton administration approved the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 and it has left thousands of injured women and more than a dozen women dead in the years following.
The Alan Guttmacher Institute notes that 13 percent of all abortions involve mifepristone, as of 2008. At that time, drug maker Danco indicated that 840,000 women in the United States have had abortions with its dangerous drug. With the increased reliance on the drug as opposed to surgical abortions, the number of unborn children who have lost their lives since its approval very well could have doubled to 1.7. million.
And when it comes to how the abortion drug has affected women, the FDA has been slow to provide the public with updates on its safety.
Last April, the Food and Drug Administration quietly released a report about the deaths of and injuries to women from the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug and the Obama administration did nothing to make the information available to women. The report indicates 14 women in the United States alone have died from using the mifepristone abortion drug and 2,207 women have been injured by it.
Of the women experiencing medical and physical problems resulting from the abortion drug, 612 women required hospitalizations, 339 experienced blood loss significant enough to require a transfusion, 256 experienced infections and 48 women experienced what the FDA labeled as “severe infections.” Given that the RU 486 abortion drug caused sepsis, a potentially lethal infection that resulted in the deaths of women from around the world, the “serious infections” were very likely life-threatening situations.
“Severe infections generally involve death or hospitalization for at least 2-3 days, intravenous antibiotics for at least 24 hours, total antibiotic usage for at least 3 days, and any other physical or clinical findings, laboratory data or surgery that suggest a severe infection,” the FDA report stated.
Women developing infections from usage of the RU 486 abortion drug experienced endometritis (involving the lining of the womb), pelvic inflammatory disease (involving the nearby reproductive organs such as the fallopian tubes or ovaries), and pelvic infections with sepsis (a serious systemic infection that has spread beyond the reproductive organs).
The FDA figures also revealed abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood are still misusing the abortion drug.
Despite the FDA indicating, “Administration of mifepristone and misoprostol is contraindicated in patients with confirmed or suspected ectopic pregnancy (a pregnancy outside the uterus,” the abortion drug was given to women in 58 cases where they had an ectopic pregnancy.
Father Shenan Boquet, the director of the pro-life group Human Life International, talked about the anniversary of the abortion drug and the anniversary today:
Like other abortion methods, where a child is killed and the mother physically, emotionally and spiritually harmed, RU-486 is considered to be “safe” by the promoters of an ideology who have actually almost succeeded in changing the meaning of the word “health.” More on this troubling trend in a minute.
A new study led by Marie Stopes International, the world’s largest abortion provider, came to the conclusion, not surprisingly, that the abortion pill is “safe” despite the fact that one woman died in the study, 3.5 percent of the procedures failed and there were four cases of known infections and 21 suspected cases. The results of the study appeared last month just a day after the Therapeutics Goods Administration (TGA) approved the drug’s registration in Australia.
A recent examination of several other studies on RU-486 highlighted the drug’s deadly consequences for women, especially women in the developing world:
[T]he pill fails; medical abortions are being attempting in settings with inadequate backup to care for complications; and hemorrhaging, a common side-effect of RU-486 abortions, is harder to control in third world environments. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to disregard such problems by enthusiastic abortion advocates, eager to expand abortion use in these countries.
Despite the harm, Planned Parenthood is currently pushing for “telemed abortions” were they can do remote abortions over the web by prescribing RU-486 to women so they can self-abort.
Now back to the question of what the champions of “reproductive health” really mean by “health.” One would think that a drug that harms this many women would find enemies among the champions of “women’s health.” You would think that if the goal was to protect women, advocates for women’s health would be all over the airwaves condemning this drug, calling for its removal from the market, and championing lawsuits against its producer.
Rather, what we see are women and men singing the praises of the results of the drugs and of abortion, and attacking anyone who tries to raise the issue of actual women’s health in opposition. This is ideological blindness. When otherwise intelligent people not only refuse to consider contrary evidence, but attack those who insist that all evidence be considered, we should not be surprised when their preferred “solutions” come at the price of millions of lives.
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So when the promoters of contraception and abortion say “reproductive health,” “women’s health,” and importantly, “health care reform,” we have to realize that they are not talking primarily about healing people of illness and disability. To be fair, they also would support this healing in many cases, but that’s not what their movement is about, since no one would oppose this. They are talking about an assault on human life, lowering our population and getting rid of the weak, unwanted and “unfit.” They manipulate good-willed people who still think “health” is about healing and well-functioning physicality by sneaking in health-destructive practices and then insisting it is all about health, and insisting that we not connect the dots when cancer rates increase, maternal mortality does not improve and birth rates plunge, bringing social and economic unrest.
The culture of death requires a culture of ignorance to thrive, and this ignorance is greatly increased when our language is gutted of a true shared meaning of important words, like “health.”
