For literally decades, NRL News Today has closely tracked the campaign of pro-abortionists to “increase access” by shamelessly promoting RU-486/chemical abortions, now dressed up as “medical abortions.” Somewhere in the neighborhood of 33% to 40% of all abortions are now chemically-induced.
We’ve quoted from the FDA numerous times and although the data is woefully dated and incomplete about the medical fallout from the two-drug abortion technique, we know that nearly two dozen women are known to have died and that thousands of women suffered what are euphemistically labeled “adverse events.”
One of the much under-rated components of the pro-life movie “Unplanned” is the scene in which a woman is expelling her dead baby. There is blood everywhere and the woman suffers terrible pain.
But it’s not only pro-lifers who write about the agony of “medication” (or “medical”) abortions. So, too, do supporters who are honest about the “side effects.”
For example, I will never forget the abortion accounts of 26 women that appeared in New York magazine. The intent, obviously, was by “telling my abortion story,” to “destigmatize” abortion.
In fact, to the disinterested third party, most of these women’s accounts were depressing beyond words and saturated in pain, physical, psychology, and (dare I say?) spiritual.
One woman talked about how “On a scale of one to ten, the pain was an eight.” Another spoke of how “When I took off my jeans, blood covered my thighs. I couldn’t let the sheets get bloody, so I wrapped towels around me and stayed in bed, with incredibly painful cramping.”
Then there was the post written by a British woman, Rose Stokes, which ran under the headline, “What Happens When an Abortion Doesn’t Fully Work: I had an incomplete abortion last year. This is what I wish I’d known about them.”
Stokes tells us she wanted an abortion and that “my reasons for doing so are deeply personal reasons painful, and nobody’s business but mine.” When a woman from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) told her about chemical [“medical”] abortions, once she was heard, “Well, one you take a pill and the other is more invasive,” Stokes was in.
“I didn’t have much time to go into greater detail—and to be honest didn’t want to—so I went for the medical abortion, assuming it would be simpler.”
And then the ordeal began. After taking the second of the two drugs, Stokes tells us, “It felt like an act of self-violence. I remember walking back out into the waiting room and folding into my mom’s arms—crying with a ferocity I hadn’t experienced since childhood.”
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The BPAS woman consoles her and tells Stokes the “miscarriage” could happen any time up until two weeks. But…
Around four hours later once we’d returned to the apartment, I felt an unfamiliar pain stir deep inside me, somewhere in between my lower spine and belly button. Within an hour, I had gone into full labor—I’ll spare you a long description, but: contractions, vomiting, bleeding, crying, shi–ing. It went on for hours. My mom was incredible; I was traumatized. Somehow it made us closer.”
Within 12 hours, the contractions were fewer, and Stokes thought the worst was over. A week later, however, she goes to a doctor who tells Stokes her blood pressure “is dangerously low” and she’s off to the hospital where she learns she has an “incomplete abortion”—the baby’s dead body has not been expelled.
“Surgery was scheduled for three days later to remove the ‘remaining products,’ and I was signed off work for another week,” Stokes writes. “The whole ordeal left me physically and emotionally wrung out.”
Stokes gives us other examples of chemical abortions “gone wrong,” but of course comes to the correct conclusion: no regrets, only a desire that she could have been “fully informed and prepared for what could happen to my body, rather than finding out during the process.”
Really? That’s the only “lesson” she took away? Not that her chemical abortion, which was supposed to resemble a “heavy period,” was painful, dragged out, and potentially very dangerous to her?
There evidently was never any hesitation, so that after taking the first abortifacient pill (mifepristone), Stokes would never have rethought her decision and chose not to take the second pill (misoprostol).
That is a real tragedy, for not only could she have spared herself from an awful ordeal, Stokes might have saved the life of her defenseless unborn baby.
I once asked Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon, NRLC Director of Education & Research, about the Abortion Industry’s investment in chemical abortions and its assurance that “these abortions are simple and totally safe.” He told me
They rarely share the stories of hundreds of women who have been hospitalized or the two dozen who have died after taking these dangerous abortifacients.
The abortion industry has been trying to cope with reduced demand and falling revenues by cutting facility, equipment and salary costs by going to webcam abortions where an abortionist never, ever actually physically examines a woman and only monitors her from afar.
It is an irresponsible and dangerous medical abandonment of the woman at precisely the time when her risk is most serious.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
