In case the Canadian Medical Association Journal wasn’t clear on the harms of the RU486 drug cocktail they call “the gold standard” for abortions, this will help.  Celeste McGovern, an excellent investigative journalist, had this piece a few years back.  Misopristol is the drug used in combination with mifepristone to make up the RU486 regime.  Misopristol was designed to address gastric ulcers, it was never intended for “pregnancy termination.”

Just weeks before the FDA approved RU- 486, G.D. Searle, the manufacturer of misopristol, issued a “physician alert” to the FDA and to every obstetrician and gynecologist in the USA, warning that misopristol “is not approved for the induction of labor or abortion.”

The Peapack, N.J.-based subsidiary of Pharmacia Inc. said that misopristol, sold under the shelf name Cytotec, was developed and clinically tested only to treat gastric ulcers. Searle warned, “Serious adverse events reported following off-label use of Cytotec in pregnant women include maternal or fetal death, uterine hyperstimulation, rupture or perforation requiring uterine surgical repair, hysterectomy … amniotic fluid embolism, vaginal bleeding, retained placenta, shock, fetal bradycardia and pelvic pain.”

The FDA, which had recommended that misopristol be used in combination with mifepristone as part of RU-486 treatment, posted Searle’s warning letter on its Web site, but did not withdraw its recommendation. The Population Council would not release a copy of the informed-consent papers women in the trial signed before taking part in the Canadian study, and Horzepa refused to say if the women in the trial were aware of the Searle letter.

Roslyn Tremblay, a spokeswoman for Canada’s federal health department, also declined to confirm if the women in the study were aware of the warning. “Within the Canadian context, any research information is proprietary information and would have to be released by the company,” said Tremblay.

But abortionist Wiebe disclosed that none of the women were informed about Searle’s physician alert.

Ellen Wiebe was the woman in charge of the first Canadian trial of RU486.

Really, where are the feminists when you need them?

I wrote about this issue over at the ActivateCFPL blog:

Over the last few weeks, public comment on the issue makes it apparent that there is still confusion surrounding the funding of abortion procedures in Canada.

Joyce Arthur wrote a piece at Rabble.com where she lambasted Campaign Life Coalition’s Defund Abortion campaign; painting the protestors as naïve, uninformed activists fighting for a hopeless cause. Two weeks ago, a letter written by Health Minister Deb Matthews was made public and also garnered attention…

Contrary to the arguments that some pro-choice advocates advance, determining which medical procedures may or may not be considered “medically necessary” in Canada is no easy task. Actually, it’s a bit of nightmare for everyone, from seasoned judges to patients simply seeking medical care.

Read the rest here.

This pill-peddling, non peer-reviewed editorial in the CMAJ is a disgrace.

It calls on Health Canada to approve mifepristone (RU486), referring to it as the “gold standard” for inducing safe and early non-surgical abortion.”

The drug mifepristone is internationally recognized as the best method to provide non-surgical abortion within the first nine weeks of pregnancy, the editorial states. Yet it is not available in Canada.

The drug can be given orally and induces an abortion similar to a natural miscarriage within one to two days.

Reality check:  RU486 is not a tidy little pill that a pregnant mother takes, and pop, out comes her “product of conception.”

The truth is, it can take days and even weeks for RU486 to have its desired effects, and in some cases there will still be an incomplete abortion resulting in a surgical procedure.

During the RU486 trials in 2001, a woman participating in the trials came to a Vancouver hospital on August 28 complaining of severe abdominal cramping, bleeding, dizziness and weakness.  As these were considered standard symptoms for the chemical abortion procedure, she was sent home, only to come back to the hospital days later.  She died on September 1st of a gangrene infection that had spread from her uterus poisoning her vital organs and eventually stopping her heart.  This is the reason why RU486 trials were halted and the pill prohibited in Canada.

Ordinary RU486 symptoms, because of their severity, can mask an underlying complication.  If a woman is already experiencing nausea, cramping, bleeding and diarrhea, how are doctors to know if these symptoms are not a result of the bacterial infection that has been associated with the abortion drug?

Randall O’Bannon, PhD, who writes extensively on this issue, pointed out that one in 100 women was hospitalized in the U.S. trials, and that under carefully controlled clinical circumstances.  “What,” wonders O’Bannon, “would the rates be under ordinary circumstances, where follow-ups are likely to be much less rigorous?”

Even the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States, who had approved the use of RU486 in 2000, under dubious conditions and procedural violations that were extensively reported on in a New York Times article, have placed a Black Box warning on the package of mifepristone.  In a “Question and Answer” page located on the FDA web-site, they admit that “through November 5, 2004, FDA has received information from United States postmarketing reports of 676 adverse events that occurred among patients who had taken mifepristone for medical termination of pregnancy.”

In July of 2005 the FDA revised the Black Box warning for Mifeprex, the market name for mifepristone, and issued a new Dear Doctor Letter because of additional postmarketing adverse events in the United States including “overwhelming bacterial infection (septic shock)” and death.

Porn is poison. Liked this post.

I won’t yell at a guy who fights a porn addiction anymore than I’d yell at a guy who fights a crack addiction. But at least the crack addict likely won’t encounter very many people (besides his dealer) who will tell him that it’s actually healthy to smoke crack. If he ventures outside of the abandoned shack where he scores his dope, he probably won’t find any respectable people who will say, “hey, crack isn’t a big deal — it’s totally natural to smoke crack, man!” In that way, the crack smoker has a leg up on the porn addict. The porn addict, by contrast, has to fight both the compulsion itself and the myriad of creeps who will try to convince him that it’s all just a bit of innocent fun.

I think this is, in many circumstances, part of the reason why people have a hard time kicking terrible habits. They are burdened by it, they hate that they do it, but too many people come along and say it’s not a problem.

This Jimmy Kimmel video clip is hilarious.

Kimmel interviewed 5-year-old Arden Hayes last week on world geography.  Watch it here.

_________

Faye adds: Apple needs to put this kid on a retainer.

Meet Tom Mortier.  He’s a university lecturer, who received a message at work that his 64-year-old mother had been euthanized the previous day.  He had no idea this was happening.

“This is suicide with the approval of society,” he said of her death. “This has nothing to do with euthanasia.”

His mother was not terminally ill, but suffered from depression.

Quebec is currently debating legalizing euthanasia, Belgium style.  Bill 52 has passed second reading and is now being discussed in committee.  But Belgium’s euthanasia experience has been fraught with problems, abuse and people being killed without their consent.  This article concedes the following:

When Belgium legalized euthanasia, there were assurances that it would be tightly controlled and limited to exceptional cases. But the number of cases rises every year – reaching nearly 2% of total deaths last year — and the definition of what is acceptable is expanding. The country’s Senate is currently debating a proposal to permit euthanasia of minors with a “capacity of discernment” and of people suffering from dementia.

But fails to mention even more harrowing statistics, namely that studies in the Canadian Medical Association Journal (June, 2010) indicated that the law was widely abused. Almost one-third of euthanasia deaths were illegally performed without patient consent. And half of nurses administering euthanasia  did so without the patients knowledge and consent.

The researchers found that a fifth of nurses admitted being involved in the assisted suicide of a patient. But nearly half of these  –  120 of 248  –  also said there was no consent.

“The nurses in our study operated beyond the legal margins of their profession,” said the report’s authors in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

“It is likely many nurses ‘ under-reported’ their involvement for fear of admitting an illegal activity,” the study said.

After his first-hand experience with euthanasia, Mr. Monteros has gone from indifferent to vehemently opposed, and actively so.

Mr. Montero’s warning to Canadians is that once euthanasia is allowed, even supposedly for the most exceptional cases, it opens a crack that will widen over time. “I believe that once you accept the principle of euthanasia, we do not know how to set the limits or how to assure control of its practice,” he said. “We set strict conditions but we do not stick to them, not at all. Why? I think because euthanasia is made banal. It becomes a dignified exit. It becomes more and more normal.”

Interestingly, as often happens when euthanasia exists in a society, when you can’t get the opinions you want from your doctor, you shop around until you find someone who will give you that 99th facelift or the IVF procedure when you are well past childbearing age.  In the case of Mrs. Monteros, she did just that.  Obviously, most physicians would have counseled her to get help for her depression, but one, the one who killed her, gave in to her wishes.

She had essentially gone euthanasia shopping after initially being refused. Eventually she found a psychiatrist who concluded her depression was incurable and her suffering unbearable, and Dr. Distelmans performed the euthanasia.

“What he created is unbearable suffering for me,” Mr. Mortier said.

From CMDS Canada,

Place: St. Benedict’s Parish 45 Radcliffe Dr. Halifax, NS B3M 0E1

Date and time: 5:30 PM, Saturday, November 30th

Current Canadian Initiatives to Legalize Physician Assisted Suicide/Euthanasia (PAS/E) Implications for the Practice of Medicine in Canada

 

Two recent legal initiatives have reignited the euthanasia debate in Canada.

In Carter vs. Canada (Attorney General) 2012, a B.C. Supreme Court judge raised significant legal, medical and ethical issues by ruling in favour of legalizing PAS/E. Even though this decision was overturned by the BC Court of Appeal, the case will be decided by the Supreme Court of Canada. In June of this year, the Parti Quebecois government in Quebec introduced Bill 52 – an Act respecting end of life care that tries to legalize “medical aid in dying”. Regardless of the outcome, these two initiatives have set off another round of public discussion on the question: Is it ever justified to take a human life?

All are welcome to participate.

Facilitator: Larry Worthen, BA, MA(Th), LLB

Executive Director, Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada

A video and pictures of a baby born at 25 weeks have been circulating the Internet. This is no ordinary baby.  His story of survival was documented by his father who took video of his son’s first year of life.  And it’s quite a transformation.

As this article aptly points out:

It is one thing to make a video of your baby’s first year as a surprise for your wife. When that baby was born 15 weeks prematurely, scored the lowest he could on a test for bleeding in his brain and spent his first 107 days of life in a hospital with soaring heart rates, that gift becomes even more special.

ProLifeWire. More information about the source here.

Hmmm. I wish they had more international content.

I don’t read the New York Magazine, so I missed this one, but apparently they tried to make “things normal” by publishing the stories of women who have had abortions  – 26 stories in all.

Naomi Schaefer Riley points out in her article that “the idea that talking about things publicly will make them seem routine does not always work.”  Yup.  When featured next to mammograms and colonoscopies, abortion is not the same kind of medical procedure.

It’s not the annoying stigma attached to talking about our surgical procedures (frankly I’m happy with  the stigma), that women don’t talk about their abortions.  It’s that when they do, they do so with deep, often unspeakable pain and regret; with wringing of hands and wiping of tears.

But nothing about these stories will make women just think of abortion as just a “medical procedure.” It is not just the blood and the gore and the pain. … It is the fact that whether you see the fetus as a full human being or a potential one, something has been lost when a woman has an abortion.

What has been lost is a person, who had a future and a right to that future.  The injustice of it will never allow abortion to be like other procedures and no amount of talking about it will change that.