Excerpts from the article appearing in the Citizen
January 2000. Deadly Temptation
by Frederica Mathewes-Green
Sometimes called "the French abortion pill," RU 486 acts on the woman's hormonal
system to induce the death of her
 unborn child, then cause its expulsion from the mother's
body. It's a government-approved "human pesticide."
You just pop a pill, right?
Not so fast. There are reasons to think American women may not love RU 486 as much as
pro-choice activists hope they will.
After all, not many easy-poppin' pills induce days of bleeding accompanied by pain and
nausea. RU 486 is rough on the system, because it is, after all, intended to destroy a
healthy process. Intentionally eating a week-old hamburger is a reasonable analogy. For
some women the experience is only unpleasant, but for others it's more serious.
In one French drug trial, 1.4 percent of the women needed medical
intervention to stop the bleeding. Some even required hospitalization and
transfusions. The risk sounds slight, but in terms of word-of-mouth it could loom large.
Imagine if every abortion in a typical year were an RU 486 abortion (not likely, but
theoretically possible). If that 1.4 percent held, the number of women needing medical
care to stop excessive bleeding would be a whopping 21,000. How many such cases would it
take before woman-to-woman whispers about RU 486 began to give the pills a bad name?
Long-term health effects are likewise unknown. RU 486 is a powerful synthetic steroid
hormone, and even pro-choicers (like the authors of the 1991 book, RU 486:Misconceptions,
Myths, and Morals) have worried that it could damage the woman's ova and the children of
future pregnancies. If the
 arms
.
The thousands of children deformed because their moms used thalidomide in the 1950s come
to mind. How many of these tragedies have to occur before RU 486 is viewed with revulsion?
No doctor to blame
While the medical evidence alone is often enough to convince people that RU 486 is bad
news, there's another reason why women may not be too fond of the abortion pill.
Guy Condon, executive director of the Care Net chain of pregnancy care centers, warns that
the psychological impact will be more distressing for the woman who
uses RU 486.
"A woman who has an RU 486 abortion will have to face the
devastating realization that 'this abortion was not done to me, but I myself was the
active agent in causing the destruction of this emerging human life,' "
Condon
says.
Think about it. In a typical surgical abortion, the woman lies passively on a table while
gowned strangers on the other side of a drape take care of business. She can distance
herself from the event, and doesn't have to deal directly with its material outcome. But
in an RU 486 abortion, there is no one there to shield her from its effects.
David Reardon, director of the Elliot Institute and an expert on post-abortion grief, says
that when a woman is the agent of the abortion, she loses one of the crutches that would
otherwise help her fend off post-abortal misery:"She
can't blame the abortionist."
Reardon says the response to RU 486 may be quite different than the response to a standard
suction abortion. "When a woman goes to an abortion clinic, the process is over and
done with literally in a matter of minutes. RU 486 drags out her
."
Peggy Hartshorn, president of the Heartbeat International chain of pregnancy centers,
recalls an incident where this delay was a factor.
"One of our affiliates counseled a woman who was taking
 part in [the 1998] trial of
RU 486 and having second thoughts. She was in the midst of the procedure and it was very
traumatic for her. The process is really revolting to go through," Hartshorn says.
"We've seen women in the process call us, desperate for help. .
. . But with RU 486, you can't. The chemicals have already done their work, and the child
is either dead or potentially damaged."
Not only does the woman feel increased responsibility for the abortion, not only is it a
long and harrowing time, but it also may be a lonely time. There is no team of efficient
clinic workers to clean up and discard evidence of a lost life. When the fetus is
delivered it will be intact, not torn to shreds as in a surgical suction abortion. The woman may find herself sitting on her bathroom floor at 2 in the
morning cradling her tiny child in her bloody fingers.
"It's a horrific scenario," Condon says. "This is not the kind of sorrow
that is tinged with the positive, as in 'I had to make this sacrifice in love, though it
hurts right now.' It's a despairing sorrow, destructive to the being of that woman."
Of course, most women will not see their fetus. Since RU 486 can only be used in the
earliest weeks of pregnancy, the child is still very small, at most two inches long. Yet
if the child is seen, the effect is profound. Two women told Hippocrates magazine about
their experiences taking RU 486 in France. A 21-year-old student
said, "It had two dark spot like eyes and a little skeleton not quite formed....I
think about this often. I haven't talked about it to anyone. I feel quite empty."
A 30-year-old television producer had a similar story. "I
wanted to reach out and touch it," she said. "It was so small, I thought. In
eight months this could have been a baby."
The same thing sometimes happens during a miscarriage, and in the pro-life movement one
occasionally meets women who say this experience was what moved them from a pro-choice to
a pro-life position. Before seeing the baby, they thought it was only theoretical life,
only "tissue." After seeing that miniature form there was no denying that it was
human-a tiny, vulnerable life, her own son or daughter.
This may be what Edouard Sakiz, then-chairman of the company that manufactures RU 486 in
France, had in mind
 when he told the French newspaper Le Monde in 1989, "RU 486 is not at all easy to use. In fact it is much more complex to
use than the technique of vacuum extraction....[A] woman who wants to end her pregnancy
has to 'live' with her abortion for at least a week using this technique. It's an
appalling psychological ordeal."
A deceptive relief
Researchers in St. Louis interviewed women at two weeks after their RU 486 abortion, and
again 6-8 months later. While most were satisfied with the experience, by the later
interview there was more guilt, and more doubts about their decision.
Other studies have compared RU 486 with surgical abortion. A
1991 British study found that 25 percent of those who used RU 486 said they would change
to another method in the future, compared with only 6 percent of those who had a surgical
abortion. Those who wouldn't repeat the RU 486 experience were more likely to be
younger, childless, to have needed more analgesia, and "to have seen the products of
conception." No surprise-the women who saw their dead child
didn't want to do so again.
Similar sentiments are found in a French textbook, which notes that chemical abortions are
not recommended for "women who want a rapid method, or who do not want to be
implicated in the accomplishing of their abortion"(emphasis added). On the question
of how women react to seeing the aborted fetus, the text says it "can preserve
certain fantasies about the existence of a 'baby,' which contribute to the anguish or
guilt of the woman."
The text also notes that some women complain that the pills are too big and too difficult
to swallow, indicating the "psychic importance of the act compared with the banality
of the immediate action. It happens that some women speak of 'poison.' The idea of death
is sometimes near: The evocation of dying is near."
What effect will RU 486 have here? In a recent New York Times Magazine article, author
Margaret Talbot dreams big: peace in the abortion wars. Her hope is that pro-lifers,
stymied in their goal of picketing abortion clinics, will give in and accept RU 486.
The weak link, of course, is the hope that pro-lifers will accede to the popular notion
that abortion is all right if it's done early, because it doesn't yet look like a baby.
This is a combination of sentimental illogic and wishful thinking, and can't be defended
in any coherent way: People are supposed to "just know" that the unborn isn't
really "one of us," just as people in the town where I grew up "just
knew" that blacks weren't really
"one of us." It's natural for those in power to exclude from the community ones
who look different. It's natural, but it's not right.
Of course it doesn't matter what the unborn "looks like." An embryo doesn't look
like a baby, but a baby doesn't look like a toddler, who doesn't look like a teen-ager,
who doesn't look like Grandma. The idea that it's OK to kill her early on in life, before
she starts looking cute, is ominous for any of us who look less than adorable.
Earlier generations believed that the child was an inert lump until it "came to
life" suddenly at quickening and the mother felt it move, hence earlier cultures'
permission of abortion before movement. Now we know: She was alive at the moment of her
conception; just too small to move, to feel.
Frederica Mathewes-Green is a columnist for Christianity Today and a commentator on
National Public Radio.
This article (in its entirety) appeared in Citizen magazine. Copyright © 2000 Focus on
the Family. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.
Source:
NewsMax; October 9, 2000
Former
Abortionist Bernard Nathanson Warns of RU-486 Dangers
Washington, DC -- A prominent former abortionist warns that RU-486, the
abortion drug recently approved by the federal government, has potentially
harmful side effects for women who use it.
In 1969, Dr. Bernard Nathanson was co-founder of National Association for
the Repeal of Abortion Laws, later renamed National Abortion Rights Action
League. He was also the director of what was then the largest abortion
facility in the world New York Citys Center for Reproductive and Sexual
Health.
Presiding over 60,000 abortions during his career and helping to make
abortion legal in the United States, Nathanson later renounced his
profession and became a pro-life advocate, a conversion that made
headlines.
During a recent interview, Nathanson revealed dangers that the FDA doesnt
want to reveal to the American public about RU-486 and its companion drug,
misoprostol, or cytotec. He commented that the approval of RU-486, or
mifepristone, had less to do with public health and more to do with the
politics of the Food and Drug Administration.
According to Nathanson, one potentially harmful side effect of RU-486 is
the possibility that disorders could be passed down to surviving offspring
of women who have taken the drug.
"RU-486 is the drug which acts on the female reproductive system, and
anything that does that we have to be keenly aware of what are called
transgenerational effects," said Nathanson.
One such drug acting on the female reproductive system was given to women
during the 1940s and 1950s to stop excessive bleeding and to prevent
miscarriages. Although the drug proved to be ineffective, it had an
unintended side effect. Many female children of the women who had taken
the drug suffered from a transgenerational effect and developed vaginal
cancer, which led to numerous mutilating operations and death.
Another concern Nathanson has regarding RU-486 is that a woman who starts
taking the pill may decide to carry the baby to term. The result,
Nathanson said, can be serious skull deformities for the newborn.
Although RU-486s harmful side effects may apply only to the children of
women who have taken the drug, its companion drug, cytotec, may have
health-altering consequences for the women, too, the doctor warns.
"RU-486 in itself is not potentially dangerous to women, but [cytotec]
is,
and you have to give them together," Nathanson said. Nathanson
explained
that the drug has a potential to cause asthma, or exacerbations of asthma,
and "things of that sort."
The drug also can cause excessive bleeding, Nathanson said, because at the
early stages of a pregnancy, the drug cytotec, which expels the dead baby
from the womb, often isnt completely successful on its own. The pregnancy
tends to detach itself partially but not enough to be expelled, causing
the bleeding.
"Many of these women bleed for hours at home, having terrible cramps,
and
end up in emergency rooms," Nathanson said.
Besides physical harm, Nathanson said, there are other potential problems
that could spring up because of the dangerous abortion drug. One problem
would be that already overcrowded emergency rooms would be even more
overcrowded with young women who are experiencing excessive bleeding.
But even if the woman completes the abortion at home, she must still show
the remains of her unborn child to the abortion practitioner.
"Many states have laws which require that the physician examine the
fetal
remains whatever is passed," Nathanson said. "Now the question
is how is a
young girl of 17 going to go plowing through a toilet bowl full of blood
clots and other nasty things to try to find this tiny little fetus and
bring it to the doctor?
Perhaps an even more complex problem, which could involve international
drug enforcement agencies, could be that the drug will find its place in
the dark world of organized crime. "Theres no doubt a black market
will
spring up with these pills in respect to smuggling into Central and South
America, or places where they dont approve of abortion," Nathanson
said.
A woman wanting to have an abortion using the pill would now have to pay a
hefty fee $600 for the three pills of RU-486 and two pills of cytotec.
Nathanson calls this price-gouging but believes the price will eventually
come down and be easily affordable.
Right now, Nathanson explained, a woman could walk into an abortion
facility and pay just $150. However, even if an abortion practitioner
sells a set of the pills at the exorbitant rate Nathanson said pharmacists
would probably not sell the pill; abortion facilities will sell them
directly he believes this poses a conflict of interest.
Once the price of the pills comes down, Nathanson said, the pills would in
all probability show up in the clinics of the nations public schools.
"Theyll pass this out [in school] too, and many kids, probably, will
be
using this for contraception and adults too," said Nathanson. "Theyll
be
taking it every month at the end of the month just to be sure."
Although Nathanson made it clear during the interview he was speaking more
as an ob-gyn and less as a pro-life advocate and bioethicist, he concluded
his discussion over the pill by saying, "It really trivializes life,
so
there are ethical and moral issues."
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See also
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as the quick fix
for unwanted pregnancies. Women who take it will learn otherwise.