By Randall K. O’Bannon, Ph.D., NRL-ETF Director of Education & Research
We do not know her name or her age or precisely where in Australia she comes from, and we don’t know a lot of the medical details. But press accounts which came out just today tell us that a woman taking RU486 there died in 2010. Whether this is one of the international deaths mentioned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in its 2011 report is not clear at this point.
This tragedy reminds us that when RU486, the “abortion pill,” debuted in the United States in 2000, the media gushed over the new safe, simple, more “natural” chemical abortion option. It was just a matter of time before other countries around the globe (waiting for America to approve), authorized its sale in their own countries. Australia was one of the countries that bought the hype, allowing use of the drug in 2006.
Only after it had been on the market for a couple of years in the U.S. did Americans start to learn that the drugs were not as safe, simple, or “natural” as had been advertised. A woman in France had died in France in 1991, but it was dismissed as a special case. But then a Canadian woman died in trials there in 2001.
Days later, a woman died in Tennessee when her undetected, unresolved ectopic pregnancy ruptured. Within a period of a couple of years, four women from California died from rare infections after using the drugs. In 2011, the FDA revealed that there had been at least 14 deaths associated with RU486 in the United States and another five of women using the drugs outside the U.S.
Now Australia has its own RU486-associated death.
In a March 19, 2012, report from the Australian Broadcasting Company, Caroline de Costa, a university professor that the news network describes as “a prominent advocate for the introduction of medical abortion to Australia,” revealed that the woman had received the drugs at a Marie Stopes clinic and died of an infection she contracted after the abortion. (Marie Stopes is a prominent international abortion promoter and provider based in Britain)
Though previous infection deaths among RU486 patients have been connected to bacteria from the Clostridium family, de Costa says that “The organism, the bacteria, I have heard was group A streptococcus.”
While Clostridium is a common bacteria, it usually poses no problem to people unless it gets into an open wound. Group A strep, though, infects more than 10 million people a year (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, at www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/streptococcal/Pages/Default.aspx, accessed 3/19/12), though most of these are mild and treatable.
Promoters of the abortion pill in the U.S. and overseas have tried to reduce the number of patient visits. (In the protocol approved by the FDA there were three: one to be screened and receive the RU486 to starve the child, a second to be administered the prostaglandin that expels the child, a third to confirm whether or not the abortion is complete). For her part de Costa is calling for closer observation.
“If you are going to have the woman undergoing the abortion processes at home, which has certainly been done in overseas studies and we have been doing it in Cairns,” de Costa says, “then you must have close contact with her. And she must know and you must know what arrangements are in place if she should need emergency care or extra care.” That close contact and reduced contact stand at odds with each other seems not to occur to de Costa or the rest of RU486’s supporters.
De Costa argues for the prophylactic use of antibiotics as part of the protocol. Planned Parenthood adopted this as part of their protocol in the U.S., though there has been some disagreement in the abortion community over the cost and effectiveness of this practice. (See NRL News, September 2009, www.nrlc.org/news/2009/NRL09/PPFA.html).)
Marie Stopes International did not tell the Australian Broadcasting Company whether or not it planned to review its procedures, but did say that serious infection was a very rare but known risk.
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