LAC News
Two More Women Die After Taking RU-486
By Cara Cook
March 2006

Two more American women have died after taking RU-486, “the abortion pill,” which brings the total deaths in the United States to seven.

Concerned Women for America (CWA), along with other organizations that have been outraged by the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) endorsement of the drug, has demanded that the FDA revoke its approval of RU-486 (also known as “mifepristone” and “Mifeprex”).

Vanessa Cullins, vice president for medical affairs of the Planned Parenthood (PP) Federation of America, claimed in a Washington Post article that because “only” seven women have died out of the supposedly 560,000 chemical abortions that have taken place in the United States, there is no reason to suspend RU-486.

However, CWA disagrees. “The FDA has pulled other drugs that have caused fewer deaths and less severe complications than RU-486…,” said Wendy Wright, CWA’s President. “Why the double standard for an abortion drug that is now linked to the deaths of seven healthy women and over 800 other reported complications?"

CWA supports two bills introduced in response to these tragedies. On March 17, Sens, Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) and Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-Oklahoma) called on Congress to pass S. 511, the RU-486 Suspension and Review Act, to take the drug off the market pending a review. Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-Maryland) introduced Holly's Law in 2003 to ban the use of RU-486. This bill was named after Holly Patterson, an 18-year-old California woman who died following a medical abortion, and it has 79 co-sponsors. 

The FDA claimed that the risk of death after using RU-486 is the same as that from surgical abortions. However, in a December 1, 2005, article in The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Michael F. Greene asserts that while he deems the drug as safe for use, RU-486 is 10 times more likely to cause fatal infections than surgical abortions.^[1]

Further, this figure addresses only deaths from infection, but does not take into account deaths or life-threatening complications associated with RU-486 from ectopic pregnancies, hemorrhaging or other adverse events.

Adding to the risk of the drug itself, which has been approved for only one purpose - to kill a human being ¯ PP and other abortionists have violated the FDA regulations on how to administer it. With news of the latest deaths, PP announced it would start following one of the FDA guidelines that it had flaunted in the past. On March 17, PP announced that instead of telling women to take misoprostol vaginally, it will “recommend” that they take it orally—which the FDA requires. Misoprostol is the second drug in the RU-486 regimen, used to expel the dead baby.

“Planned Parenthood’s use of the word ‘recommend’ – as if women would on their own take it any other way – follows its standard practice of diverting blame for any complication away from itself or the drugs and onto the patient. Its long-term legal and public relations strategy has been to fault women for complications they suffer from abortions, even though the women followed the abortionist’s instructions,” said Wright.

An Associated Press article claims that women who become infected from RU-486 did not follow FDA guidelines, overlooking the fact that PP clinics are advising women not to follow such guidelines. 

Regrettably, violations related to RU-486 are not new. Shortly after FDA approval of the drug in 2002, CWA teamed up with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Christian Medical Association to file a Citizen Petition requesting the FDA to suspend its approval of the drug.

An Executive Summary of the Citizen Petition spells out the risk RU-486 poses to women’s health by listing eight of the FDA’s violations of federal law and the FDA’s own standards for approval of New Drug Applications. Among these are the FDA’s approval of RU-486 without the submission of data from adequate and well-controlled clinical trials, and the failure to require the drug to be tested on adolescents, even though it may be and is being used on adolescents. This omission runs contrary to an FDA rule requiring pediatric testing.

“Women are paying the price for the FDA’s and abortion clinics’ negligence,” said Wright. “No other drug would have been approved the way RU-486 was, and no other drug with its track record would still be on the market. Abortion corrupts every industry it touches. But perhaps people will now see that this has gone too far, that too many women have suffered from the lie that abortion is ‘safe.’”

Endnotes

[1] Michael F. Greene, M.D., Fatal Infections Associated with Mifepristone-Induced Abortion, 353 N. Engl. J. Med. 2317, 2318 (2005).  Dr. Greene has affirmed this ratio in comments to reporters: "Greene said that while the deaths are 'tragic,' the mifepristone-misoprostol regimen remains very safe. Surgical abortions performed at seven weeks of gestation or less carry an estimated risk of maternal mortality of about one in 1,000,000, he said. Risks for death by using Mifeprex-misoprostol are higher - about one in 100,000 - but still very low, he said."  (E.J. Mundell, Abortion Pill Deaths Probed, ABC News, November 30, 2005.  Available at http://www.abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthology/story?id=1360362.)