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.
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I am not surprised that a drug which kills the child should also kill the woman. Obviously RU486 is non-discriminatory, when it comes to ending human life.
Natalie, why are they so keen to approve RU486 when the standard protocol in Canada for a medical abortion is to use methotrexate (a chemotherapy drug) and cytotec (an ulcer drug)? Is there any particular reason why doctors would prefer that mifepristone be available?
On the other hand, last time I checked, even though abortion was the most common subject of letters to the editor of the CMAJ, the editors refused to publish any more letters, until something new opened up in the debate. Maybe they will start publishing letters to the editor on abortion again because of this (though somehow I doubt it.)
Hi Melissa, Methotrexate for ‘pregnancy termination” is an off-label use of the drug, while mifepristone (RU486) has been designed specifically for that purpose.
Both drugs rely on Cytotec, or misopristol, to expel the developing baby, which is also an off-label use of that drug. Incidentally 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.”
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.” (ref: http://www.ru486.org/wiebe2001.html)