Youth Blog

There’s no better way to celebrate Christmas in Canada than for Health Canada to bring RU-486 to the Canadian market. I mean, who wouldn’t want a chemical abortion drug in their stocking?

In a recent commentary published yesterday by the Canadian Medical Association Journal, author Dr. Sheila Dunn complains of women’s lack-of-access to the “best known option for abortion”. “It’s not clear why no one has applied to market mifepristone in Canada before now”, she writes. From an economic perspective- I completely agree. Why spend $80 million of Canadian tax-dollars on surgical abortions when you can double the price selling chemical ones too!

From a medical perspective, it’s not clear to me how any person who calls themselves a doctor could ask such a thing in a renowned medical journal unless it were a rhetorical question. Study after study from around the world has repeatedly declared this abortifacient drug to be among the most dangerous. Pro-choice, feminist author Renate Klein published the new edition of the book "RU-486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals" earlier this year stating that the drug is an “unsafe, second-rate abortion method with significant problems” after seeing it on the market for over 20 years.

In 2006, post-marketing studies in the United States and France conducted by researcher Regine Sitruk-Ware found that out of the 1.5 million women who reported taking this drug, approximately 150,000 experienced severe bleeding, 21,000 required curettage and almost 4,000 needed blood transfusions.

Even data from the Food and Drug Association collected in 2011 points to 14 deaths in the U.S due to RU-486, 58 cases of ectopic pregnancies, 356 infections and 339 women requiring blood transfusions. Given that only 1-10% of complications are ever reported to the FDA, the numbers could be up to 10 times as high.

Not to mention that the whole reason why the Canadian trials of the drug were halted in the first place was due to the fact that a woman died from septic shock eight days after taking the pill due to a clostridium infection of the uterus in 2001.

Perhaps if Ms. Dunn spoke with Monty Patterson, the answer to her question would become more clear. Patterson started the website abortionpillrisks.org after his 18-year old daughter Holly died after taking RU-486 at her local Planned Parenthood Clinic in California. “Hopefully any woman thinking about terminating early pregnancy with the medical abortion pill will be able to learn from those that have had the real experience”, he said. Or perhaps she could speak with Norine Dworkin- McDaniel, author of the article  “I Was Betrayed by a Pill” published in Marie-Claire magazine in 2007. After taking the drug, McDaniel bled profusely for 14 days, developed huge cystic boils on her neck, shoulders and back, became chronically fatigued and eventually depressed. After a visit to her gynecologist, McDaniel discovered this was not an unusual reaction to the drug learning that 1 in 3 women have similar side effects. She said it took her 9 months to feel like herself again, blasting the literature she read prior to taking the drug that told her to expect “minor cramping and bleeding”.

But isn’t it “safe”? After an Australian woman died from sepsis after being prescribed the drug from a Marie Stopes International Clinic, The Australian released evidence of a study claiming that complications from RU-486 are much higher than for standard surgical abortions.  As a woman, it’s sad to think that we are being thrown to the wolves by reducing women’s health to an argument about which drug or surgical procedure is “more dangerous”. Both procedures have devestating consequences. 

Despite all the evidence, very little is mentioned about the effects of the drug on the unborn baby. RU-486 kills a rapidly developing human being. A baby’s heart starts beating after only 3 weeks of pregnancy, and 2-5 weeks before chemical abortions like RU-486 are prescribed.

With that being said, it should come as no surprise that Hoechst, the company parented by I.G Farben- who made Zyklon-B- the poison gas used in Hitler’s gas chambers during the Holocaust- developed RU- 486. They’ve learned from their mistakes this time around. Admitting up-front to human extermination isn’t good PR. All they need now are a few pro-"choice" doctors and a medical journal and they're off to the races.