More Australia Abortion Practitioners Will Apply to Use RU 486 Abortion Drug 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
April 13, 2006
Canberra, Australia (LifeNews.com) — More abortion practitioners in Australia are planning to sign up to use the dangerous RU 486 abortion drug now that a federal agency has approved the first application for its use. Yesterday, LifeNews.com reported on an approved application from a Cairns-based abortion practitioner and three more have asked to use the pills.
Abortion practitioners at three Melbourne hospitals are considering signing up to use the drug.
Caroline De Costa won the right to import and dispense the abortion drug and doctors from the TGA, but will only be giving it to women within her practice.
Royal Women’s Hospital, Monash Medical Centre and the Austin, who want to do chemical abortions as well, are looking to ask the Therapeutic Goods Administration for approval as well.
Monash University chairman of obstetrics and gynecology, David Healy, told The Age newspaper that he is looking at the best way to make the abortion drug available to women there.
A spokesman for The Austin says the hospital did only six abortions last year, but a doctor there want to start doing abortions with the abortion pills. Pro-life groups are concerned that the use of the abortion drug will dramatically increase the number of abortions.
Right to Life Australia spokeswoman Margaret Tighe told The Age that the TGA should have been more cautious in agreeing to the first application to use the abortion drug following news that nine women have died worldwide from it and more than 850 women in the United States alone have been injured.
"Tragically it will no doubt bring about deaths of unborn children, and it may, and I hope it doesn’t, bring about the deaths of any Australian women," she said.
Meanwhile, a French company that makes the mifepristone abortion pills told The Age that it is talking with two Australian drug companies about supplying the drugs to them and pursuing registering it with the TGA.
Once the drug is registered, it would be made available to all women throughout the island nation.
Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce warned that women who use the abortion drug will experience terrible emotional and psychological consequences because they will see the dead baby after the abortion pills kill the child and cause a miscarriage to expel the dead baby’s body.
"Abortion is the taking of human life," he told The Age. "So women will be taking a pill and will pass human tissue in the form of arms and legs … In 10 years’ time we will be watching Four Corners reports on all the women who died of septic shock and the mentally ill women who end up dead."
Labor’s pro-abortion health spokeswoman, Julia Gillard, rejected the assertion and claimed the drug is safe.
