TORONTO, November 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Two abortion activists, a doctor and a lawyer, have urged Health Canada in the pages of the Canadian Medical Association Journal to approve an application to approve the controversial abortion drug RU-486 (mifepristone) for Canadian mothers seeking what the activists call a “safe, effective and often preferred method” of killing their unborn children.
But the country’s leading pro-life organization is “strongly urging” Health Canada to reject the application, calling the drug 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.
“This human pesticide has no redeeming value for the mother or the baby,” said Jim Hughes, President of Campaign Life Coalition.
Dr. Sheila Dunn, board member of the National Abortion Federation, and pro-abortion lawyer Rebecca Cook wrote a letter in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, published yesterday, calling RU-486 an “internationally recognized ‘gold standard’” for medical abortions.
In “Medical abortion in Canada: behind the times” the pro-abortion activists write that a pharmaceutical company supplying the abortion drug in France, Australia and Sweden, submitted an application last year to have Health Canada approve the drug, but the results of the submission are still pending.
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“Millions of women worldwide have used mifepristone safely and effectively,” they write, adding that it is “important that this submission not be allowed to fail.”
The activists suggest that the Canadian government is “shirking its responsibility” to women by not facilitating availability of the drug.
“Failure to provide essential drugs that only women need, including mifepristone, is a form of discrimination that Canada is obligated to remedy,” they write.
The authors conclude: “Ultimately, the availability of mifepristone in Canada would provide an important therapy that would help to optimize the health of Canadian women.”
An RU-486 abortion involves a two-drug combination usually offered to women less than nine weeks pregnant. Mifepristone, a synthetic steroid, blocks the hormone progesterone. This shut down the woman’s pregnancy-sustaining mechanism with the result that the baby, deprived of necessary life-support, starves to death and detaches from the uterine wall. Misoprostol, given a day or so later, initiates powerful uterine contractions that cause the woman to expel her baby.
The drug has been linked to serious health problems for women and death.
A 2011 Australian study found that RU-486 abortions have a far higher rate of serious complications than surgical abortion, with 5.7% of women using the drug being re-admitted to hospital for post-abortion treatment compared to 0.4% of women who had surgical abortions. The study also found women having an RU-486 abortion had a three times higher rate of sepsis than those having a surgical abortion.
A 2011 U.S. Food and Drug Administration report found that 14 U.S. women died after taking RU-486, 612 women required hospitalizations, 339 experienced blood loss significant enough to require a transfusion, 256 experienced infections, and 48 women experienced “severe infections”.
Women are beginning to realize that the drug is not as safe and effective as its promoters claim.
In a Marie Claire article titled “Betrayed by a Pill,” Norine Dworkin-McDaniel, a self proclaimed “pro-choice” woman, describes her nightmare RU-486 abortion experience.
“Clinic staffers had directed me to insert the tablets into my vagina in the morning so I’d have the day to recover. I envisioned recuperating on the couch with some uncomfortable but bearable cramps and soothing myself with bad daytime TV.”
“I never made it to the couch,” Dworkin-McDaniel writes.
“Nothing – not the drug literature, the clinic doctor, not even my own gyno – had prepared me for the searing, gripping, squeezing pain that ripped through my belly 30 minutes later. I couldn’t even form words when Stewart [her boyfriend] called to check on me. It was all I could do to gasp, ‘Come home! Now!’”
Dworkin-McDaniel goes on to describe how she bled for 14 days, broke out in “cystic boils” that covered her neck, shoulders, and back and how she became depressed.
Pro-lifers were not surprised when they discovered that the company that invented RU-486 in the 1980s had a direct link to the Nazi death camps of World War II.
German drug company Hoechst AG, parent to French company Rousell-Uclaf that invented RU-486, has been linked to the production of toxic gases for the Hitler’s Third Reich, including the deadly poison Cyclon B used to exterminate millions in the gas chambers of Nazi concentration camps.
Douglas said that it would be “irresponsible” for the government to allow distribution of RU-486.
“RU-486 kills the baby, and it can also kill the mother,” she said to LifeSiteNews.com.
Campaign Life Coalition has launched an online petition calling on Health Canada to dismiss the application for RU-486 and keep the drug off the shelves.