President Bill Clinton’s First Action Was Promoting Abortion Drug 
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by Steven Ertelt
LifeNews.com Editor
May 9, 2006
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A new report based on government records reveals former President Bill Clinton’s first action as president was to promote the dangerous abortion drug RU 486 and set the wheels in motion for its approval. The report comes as the FDA is planning a meeting Thursday to investigate why they abortion drug has killed five women in the last three years.
Judicial Watch, a public interest group, released the new report Tuesday, recently uncovered documents that shed new light on the Clinton administration’s aggressive drive to push the abortion drug on American women.
The report is based on documents obtained from the National Archives at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Arkansas in February 2006.
“As our report shows, the Clinton administration pushed the abortion pill through the approval process in order to appease the abortion lobby,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.
“These new documents prove the RU-486 approval process was infected by raw politics," he said and encouraged Congress and other authorities to launch investigations into the approval process.
President Clinton came under fire for his administration approving the abortion drug in the final months of his presidency and for using a specialized approval process reserved for lifesaving drugs that need to get to the market quickly.
The new report brings up other reasons to criticize the ex-president for his part in putting the abortion drug on the market.
The group says President Clinton pushed for FDA approval to sell the abortion drug in the U.S. despite a refusal from the drug’s manufacturer to do that.
The papers reveal President Clinton ordered the Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA to coordinate the marketing of RU-486 as his first official act in office. Within one month, the FDA Commissioner had met with the RU-486 manufacturer and parent company.
Official U.S. government political, economic and diplomatic pressure was brought to bear to strong-arm the companies into changing their policies in order to make the drug available in the United States, Judicial Watch says about the documents.
In one confidential memo, former HHS Secretary Donna Shalala "brags" that she and former FDA Commissioner David Kessler personally changed the positions of the makers of RU-486 to market the abortion pill in the United States.
The memos say the FDA was compromised in its role as an objective reviewer of the safety and efficacy of the drug because of its active role in brokering a deal between pharmaceutical firms and a pro-abortion group that obtained the rights to the abortion drug.
"At least six women and 560,000 unborn children have lost their lives due to the Clinton administration’s reckless drive to bring RU-486 to America," Fitton concluded. "This dangerous abortion pill needs to be pulled off the market immediately.”
Related web sites:
Judicial Watch – https://www.judicialwatch.org
The 64-page Clinton Administration repor t-
https://judicialwatch.org/archive/2006/jw-ru486-report.pdf
