RU 486

 

The Global traffic in abortion drugs and the drive to legitimize Do-It-Yourself Abortions

By Dave Andrusko
NRLC’s Dr. Randall K. O’Bannon knows as much about chemical abortions as anyone in our Movement. Yesterday he posted about the deeply deceptive way chemical abortion drugs are marketed worldwide.

“What is clear now is that chemical abortion has become big business, on a global scale, and a lot pharmaceutical entrepreneurs are looking to cash in,” Dr. O’Bannon wrote. “And they don’t care much about the risk these online drug stores pose to women in countries all over the globe.”
Three weeks ago he wrote the definitive essay on “Webcam abortions, Do-It-Yourself Abortions, and the ‘Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion.’”  What these stories (and many others he and I have written) have in common are many things. But at the top is a jaw-dropping nonchalance about women ordering powerful (and unregulated) abortion drugs over the Internet. It is literally almost unbelievable.

This movement has its own historian and publicist–Emily Bazelon—who wrote regularly for the New York Times Magazine before being elevated to full-time staff writer earlier this month. Her latest contribution is part of concerted effort to legitimize DYI (Do-It-Yourself] abortions is a highly sympathetic and completely one-sided profile of Jennifer Whalen.
The thrust of her long, looong piece (2,160 words) is that Ms. Whalen should be praised, not sentenced to serving a 9-to-18-month in jail (with granted work-release). Whalen’s “crime” in Bazelon’s mocking tone?

“[O]rdering pills online that her older daughter took in the first several weeks of an unplanned pregnancy, when she was 16, to induce a miscarriage. The medication was a combination of mifepristone (formerly called RU-486) and misoprostol. The drugs have been available from a doctor with a prescription in the United States since 2000 and are used around the world to induce miscarriage.”

Three points, the first two from the quotation above. Bazelon and the entire Abortion Apparatus can insist that an abortion is “inducing a miscarriage” until the end of time. But that language—the rhetoric in which chemical abortion’s lethal impact has been sheathed for 30+years—doesn’t change that the baby has been starved to death and then “expelled” by use of a drug that induces contractions.
That’s like lining up somebody as they walk across the street, running them over with your car, and telling the judge it was just the natural result of your otherwise smoothly running internal combustion engine gone awry.

Second, there was no doctor’s [read abortionist’s] prescription. Whalen went online found an “overseas drugstore” (whatever THAT means] and ordered the two drugs– mifepristone (RU-486) and misoprostol.

As we’ve reported, when the daughter, then 16, took the second of the two-drug technique (misoprostol), she began bleeding immediately. She was taken to the ER of a local hospital after experiencing severe abdominal pain.

 

 

According to Press-Enterprise’s Chris Krepich, the mother and daughter were worried something was “really wrong.” Medical records indicate the girl was “treated for incomplete abortion and UTI [urinary tract infection].” A doctor called the police. In December 2013 prosecutors charged Whalen with illegally performing an abortion.
Third, Bazelon then tells us

“Recent research increasingly suggests that early in a pregnancy, women can safely use mifepristone and misoprostol to miscarry at home. …But if the medical risk of this kind of do-it-yourself abortion is relatively small, the legal risk still looms large.”

As Dr. O’Bannon has explained time after time, contrary to what Bazelon and the Abortion Industry tells you, there is a reason the FDA wanted women to come back to the abortionist’s office to take the second drug. Chemical abortions are not a walk in the park (for the woman). They are dangerous, incredibly painful, and much more fraught with complications than defenders will admit.
“The practical problem with going online to find the pills that cause abortion is that scam sites abound,” Bazelon wrote. “Women can wind up with fake medication or without all the information they need to take the drugs safely. But that didn’t happen in this case.”
Read that carefully. It’s not just the risk of a “scam”—losing money and getting nothing or placebos in return—it’s that you don’t know what you are getting. After her daughter went to the ER, she turned out okay, which cannot be said for her grandchild, whose corpse was later expelled.
Bazelon’s gripes (of which there are many) include that it’s outrageous that in most states only physicians can perform abortions and that authorities should not have prosecuted Whalen (in her mind, no harm, no foul), even though Pennsylvania law is clear, as Montour County judge, Gary Norton explained at the sentencing.
As Montour County district attorney, Rebecca Warren, who prosecuted the case, said:

“[I]t is vital to note that this case is not about pro-life or pro-choice. In actuality, this case is about endangering the welfare of a child through the unauthorized practice of medicine and pharmacy. Specifically, the defendant was arrested for a failed abortion attempt which caused significant medical complications for a juvenile and required emergency hospital intervention. That intervention in turn triggered a mandatory reporting requirement under Pennsylvania law with regard to suspected or actual child abuse.”

She added that “the facts clearly support the charges which were filed against the defendant: performing an abortion when she is not a physician; dispensing medications when she is not a pharmacist; and, placing the minor victim in danger.”

But to Bazelon, so what? She is taking a negative (from her perspective) and trying to turn it into a huge positive. Her logic goes like this.

There’s all those pesky pro-life laws, never mind that they are intended to make it possible for a woman to have time to consider whether to have the abortion or to require abortion clinics to meet minimal safety thresholds. The cumulative results of this decreased “access” is that women must turn to DIY abortions.

For proof, she quotes (who else?) Elizabeth Nash of the Guttmacher Institute, the mouthpiece for the pro-abortion industry. “If women don’t have access to abortion clinics, some will turn to the Internet, and then, will they be charged with a crime?” Nash asks rhetorically.
So…do nothing to regulate abortion clinics–allow them to be less regulated in many states than tattoo parlors—and, of course, do not require that abortionists who fly into states to abort dozens and dozens of women a day have admitting privileges to a local hospital when the inevitable complications arise.
Because if you do, some women will turn to the Internet. And if this is a kind of contemporary back-alley abortion, then the onus is not all those peddling powerful abortifacients over the Internet, or abortion clinics that choose profits over safety, or pro-abortionists, or their legion of apologists like Bazelon.

Naw, all the blame is squarely on the shoulders of pro-lifers.
And if you believe that they have some swampland in Florida they’d love to sell you.

Source: NRLC News