RU-486: A Very Dangerous Drug

In another case of ideology overcoming common sense, the U.S. Food and Drug and Administration has now given the “okay” to the dangerous abortion drug RU-486 for general use in the United States. I say dangerous in both the obvious sense (that is, that the preborn child is murdered by this chemical) but also because of the drug’s alarming effects to the expectant mother. The medical case is actually quite clear. Why then did the FDA act in contradiction to the facts? Because like so many other agencies in our government, the FDA has allowed true science to be taken captive by feminism. Yes, political correctness is driving the nation and whether it is in the arena of women in combat, the outlandish acceptance of pedophilia by the American Psychiatric Association, or the battlegrounds of “reproductive freedom,” scientific truths are altogether ignored in a stubborn loyalty to ideology.

The ideology involved in approving RU-486 is, of course, the quest to have the cake of the sexual revolution and to eat it too. This requires social engineers to eliminate the natural “connections” of sexual activity such as self-control, fidelity within the bonds of matrimony, and , you guessed it, pregnancy. In the case of RU-486, the drug which was initially introduced as a “morning after pill” proved to be so wildly inaccurate that such an approach had to be abandoned. RU-486 simply was not “effective” before the progesterone levels reached a critical threshold. The next move was to sell RU-486 as a “menstrual regulator”; that is, a pill which a woman could take regularly and never be aware that she might be aborting a pregnancy. That proved problematic also because it was soon seen that RU-486 produced a phenomenon in which a woman’s ovulatory and menstrual cycles became unlinked. This necessarily reduced the drug’s power to end the pregnancy.

So, what next? Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the discoverer of the supposed wonder drug, began to claim that, despite these limitations, RU-486 would soon replace surgical abortions performed in the first 10 weeks of pregnancy. As a matter of fact, though, it was quickly established that the drug did not work very well after the seventh week of pregnancy nor before the fourth. One more false claim demolished. And then there’s the neglected fact that RU-486 requires “assistance” from prostaglandin drugs as a matter of course - drugs that force the convulsions of labor in order to expel the (usually) dead baby. This long list of failed intentions, as you can see, make RU-486 a far cry from the simple, stand-alone drug it is claimed to be.

It should be no surprise that this complete story of RU-486 is being poorly covered by the world’s media. After all, most journalists are in agreement with the abortion-euphoria of modern feminism and therefore they accept the “junk science” defenses. Certainly, if this was not the case, the press would have penetrated the RU-486 hype and informed us about such items as the following:

According to an international inquiry commission convened in Paris in 1992, the prescribed use of RU-486 includes as many as six or seven visits to the physician! That’s not at all the simple, do-it-yourself-at-home abortion drug that the press continues to suggest. These doctor visits involve one visit to confirm the pregnancy and administer the drug; another requiring 12 hours in a hospital for prostaglandin injections; a possible third visit to expel the body of the preborn child; another visit (required in 20% of the cases) for repeat prostaglandin injections; another visit sometimes required for a surgical D & C; and, when that’s necessary, yet another visit to insure that all parts of the dead baby are removed from the uterus! Finally, the well-documented problem of excessive bleeding associated with RU-486 often requires hospital stays as well.

A joint committee of the French Republic including the Director of General Health, the Director of Hospitals, and the Director of Pharmacy and Medicine has directed that prostaglandins present a significant danger to a patient’s cardiovascular action. For that reason (and in the face of other severe consequences of using RU-486), the French now suggest that whenever prostaglandins are given that cardiopulmonary resuscitation equipment be present along with a defibrillator, calcium channel blockers, and the monitoring of vital signs over a period of hours because of the danger these drugs present to the human heart. This amounts to an Intensive Care Unit. But again, do you get this picture when you read news stories about RU-486? No, a distinctly dangerous ideology now has the helm; science has been hijacked in the quest for total sexual freedom - regardless of the personal or cultural costs.