OTTAWA, December 5, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Health Canada’s Deputy Minister has come out saying that there is no pending application to have the controversial abortion drug RU-486 (mifepristone) approved in Canada after the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) published an article last week stating the existence of such an application.
Department of Health Deputy Minister George Da Pont made the statement at a parliament Health Committee meeting last week. During the meeting NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East, BC) asked Da Pont why Health Canada had not yet approved RU-486, mentioning the CMAJ article.
“The answer is relatively simple: To date, no company has applied to market the product in Canada,” replied Da Pont.
“Obviously if we receive such an application, we would study very much the data, the experience in other countries, and we would try to deal with it as quickly as possible,” he said.
Da Pont’s made his statement on the same day that the CMAJ article appeared online.
Two abortion activists, Dr. Sheila Dunn and lawyer Rebecca Cook, urged Health Canada in a CMAJ article titled “Medical abortion in Canada: behind the times” to approve an application for RU-486 (mifepristone), reported LifeSiteNews.com last week.
The authors explicitly state that in 2012, a pharmaceutical company “brought forward the first known new drug submission for mifepristone to Health Canada.”
Calling RU-486 an “internationally recognized ‘gold standard’” for medical abortions, the authors stated that “[m]illions of women worldwide have used mifepristone safely and effectively,” adding that it is “important that this submission not be allowed to fail.”
Health Canada did not respond to LifeSiteNews.com before press time asking if the Deputy Minister misspoke or if the pro-abortion authors had their facts wrong.
The country’s leading pro-life organization Campaign Life Coalition immediately responded to the CMAJ article, denouncing RU-486 as a “human pesticide” that harms mothers and kills babies.
“Canada has very wisely kept this drug out of our country based on the evidence of severe side-effects and complications which include severe cramping, nausea, vomiting, heavy bleeding, heart attacks (particularly in women over thirty five and smokers),” said Mary Ellen Douglas, national organizer for Campaign Life Coalition, in a press release.
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The country’s pro-life doctors also condemned the call to import the drug, calling RU-486 a “grievous misuse of medical science.”
“This is death we are talking about, not just of the unborn babies but sometimes of the mothers themselves,” the Canadian Physicians for Life stated in a press release.
Campaign Life Coalition launched a petition on Monday to have the country’s health minister Rona Ambrose “definitively reject” the chemical abortion pill. As of today, the petition has been signed by more than 1,200 people.
The RU-486 chemical abortion method has been linked to serious health problems for women across the globe, including numerous deaths.