A horrifying piece about RU486 and what happens to the women who take it. Is it better to abort at home, privately? I don’t think so.
The image of the baby she wrapped up and threw away would flash across her memory for a year afterwards. Stacy Massey, counselor and founder of Abortion Recovery InterNational (ARIN), said the visual memory of an RU486 abortion is the hardest. Massey lay on a table 30 years ago for her own abortion and played football the next day. But women who have a chemical abortion actually see—sometimes floating in a toilet or a shower—the graphic aftermath of their own abortions.
A seven-week unborn child already has brain waves, a mouth, lips, forming fingernails, eyelids, toes, and a nose. After women expell their unborn babies, they have to dispose of them. Massey said she once got a desperate call from a woman who said, “My baby’s floating in the toilet. What do I do now? Do I flush it?” And one couple went to a hotel to have an abortion and the woman locked herself in the bathroom, sobbing and screaming.
The feelings of guilt can be more intense for women who have undergone chemical abortions, said Massey, since they themselves administered the pill while they were fully conscious: “For me who went and lay on a table, somebody else did it. Yes, I made the decision but I was always able to rationalize that. I didn’t kill my own baby—somebody else did.” Massey said that the trauma seems to be more severe with younger women since many older women have experienced natural miscarriages.
For the record, I don’t believe there is any way to make an abortion feel OK. But there are ways to make it be worse for the women who undergo them, and RU486 – the way it isolates the women and leaves them on their own to deal with the consequences of their choice to kill their unborn baby – certainly is one of them. How callous and lacking in basic human compassion do you have to be to give this drug to a young pregnant woman with a pat on the knee and a cheerful “Good luck!” before sending her on her lonely way???
[h/t]
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Andrea adds: A woman suffering alone at home, faced with the remains of her child is a horrifying thing. So is a sterile, government-funded clinic that “flushes” the remains for you. I guess that’s why we have this blog, to hash these things out. Pretty distressing all round.
by 
I did a little research on chemical abortion.
There are several reasons why it’s not as popular as in France. It’s not just that RU-486 isn’t presently legal (although you can get chemical abortions with misoprostol and methrotrexate combined).
Women tend to prefer the surgical abortion because it’s over and done with in 5 minutes. With chemical abortions, you need multiple trips, and there’s a significant chance of having to go back and get a surgical abortion anyway because the abortion failed (about 1 in20). Surgical abortion is a surer bet for the purpose of ending a pregnancy.
Another reason it’s not as popular is that our health system doesn’t generally cover chemical abortions, except in BC. There’s no protocol for it. It’s not a D & C. It consists of either injections and/or pills. A nurse can effectively do all the steps. The clinics *could* offer it, but since it’s not covered by insurance, there might not be any takers.
Consider also that many of the abortions in Canada are performed in the Morgentaler clinic. Morgentaler perfected the suction aspiration abortion in Canada.
In France, half of the abortions are chemical abortions now. Things aren’t going too well in the abortion industry. Since abortion isn’t “properly” subsidized, i.e. the government doesn’t give a good price, more clinics and hospitals are abandoning it– it’s not profitable. Chemical abortions are seen as the way to go to make up for the loss of competent abortionists. The thing is, women are so isolated with these abortions. Since it’s so new, they’re even more isolated. People don’t get the trauma of going into labour and delivering your dead baby.
Just recently, I read of a case of another girl who was raped and given abortion drugs to expel the fetus. The people around her considered it was less traumatic than just actually delivering the baby live.
This story just affected so deeply, I am shaking. I am 28 weeks into a pregnancy and just feel sick at the thought of what these women go through.
I know it was their “choice”, but I think the larger discussion is do women really understand all that is involved? Due to abortion being such a scared cow and the denial that a fetus is anything but a parasitic clump of cells, so much actual scientific reality if obscured. I find it so strange (as a non-religious person) that pro-lifers are told that the only motivation for holding that view is religion and that we are “anti-science”. What is being obscured is the science and reality of human development – which is so absolutely awe-inspiring and amazing. In the feminism forum on the left-wing rabble.ca site you cannot even post real images from the womb from NatGeo accompanied with zero commentary without getting banned.
Seriously, I am still shuddering at that story as I feel my baby kick and move inside me.
Oh – and wondering what you ladies think of this:
http://www.intouchweekly.com/content/cover/img_cover_large.jpg
I’m going to save my horror and sympathy for the human beings who die in these procedures. There is no reasonable explanation for any woman over the age of 16, save those with developmental disabilities or living in extreme social isolation, not to know that within a few weeks of conception, a visually recognizable human being will have to be expelled from her body, one or another, if she has made that “choice”. Why should we desire to protect women from direct knowledge of the consequences of their choices?
Lauri, I know what you mean. And yet, I’m going to disagree. I know ardent pro-life women who faced with a severely unwanted pregnancy, dabbled with the idea of abortion. I know one pro-life woman who went ahead and had an abortion. If she did, then the average woman on the street who isn’t steeped in pro-life thinking doesn’t stand a chance. My friend lives out the repercussions of her choice every day. And to answer your question, “Why should we desire to protect women from direct knowledge of the consequences of their choices?”–we shouldn’t. But the current culture doesn’t give us any information about logical outcomes prior to being faced with an unwanted pregnancy. Abortion in our culture is shrouded in positive language (see choice rhetoric, which many believe). That leaves us with good women, making bad choices, and living out things that should be consigned to nightmares in their own bathrooms.
Yes – Lauri, my point wasn’t that we should “desire to protect women from direct knowledge of the consequences..”. My point was that right now they are being denied accurate information. They are not being protected from the consequences and there are also living in a culture that makes killing your baby sound as easy as going to get your nails done for a couple of hours. It is just a stop at a clinic, it is just a medical procedure, it is just a clump of cells.
In this environment, where most women are also led to believe that the pro-life message is about nothing more than religious zealots out to deny women’s rights – they may be going into this situation without fully comprehending the magnitude. I am also not saying that this should absolve them from the responsibility of finding out and considering this on their own – just that they may not fully understand until it is too late. Then they are left with a lot of anger on top of the other myriad of emotoins.
I find it more difficult than you, Andrea and Elizabeth, to believe that the majority of women who have abortions do so in good faith, that is, believing that it is an act on par with having a tooth pulled. I also think that the argument that women are not fully informed because someone else won’t give them accurate information smacks of the eighteenth century, when women were considered the “weaker” sex, too delicate or too naturally stupid to be educated. Women themselves knew this was not the case (see Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.) Women are intelligent, capable human beings who must be held to account for the choices they make. I will gladly join those who have had abortions and believe themselves to have been lied to about the consequences in their anger and pain, but the victims of abortion will always be the unborn human beings who die.
Firstly, as a woman, I would like to point out that not all women are intelligent.
Not all intelligent women make every choice based on intelligence. Many people, including women, will sometimes choose based on emotion and /or fear.
Sometimes information alone does not convince. Sometimes women need to be approached on the level from which they are making the decision.
This is one reason why a graphic image will sometimes get a point across better than a pamphlet.
I was at least in part raised with the “logic conquers all” mentality–only to go about the business of life to find out that a. logic does not usually conquer at all and b. sometimes even I do not use it. Which is my point here. There’s knowing and then there’s K-N-O-W-I-N-G (which generally happens after you’ve made a wretched mistake). Our culture allows plenty of women to trundle along into the most wretched mistake a person can make.
“In this environment, where most women are also led to believe that the pro-life message is about nothing more than religious zealots out to deny women’s rights”
Some people think of it more as religious zealots out to stop people having sex. If the most influencial organisations would just stop their campaigns against contraceptive education, it’d improve their credibility a bit.