By Randall K. O'Bannon, Ph.D.
National Right to Life director of Education & Research
There are some who have been suggesting that people look at the vaginal self-administration of the prostaglandin, the second drug in the process, as the most likely means of introducing the deadly bacteria, Clostridium sordellii, into a woman's reproductive tract. But we've learned that Clostridium sordellii is already present in 10% of all women's vaginal flora, and yet infections with this pathogen are extremely rare, even with the normal bleeding of a woman's reproductive life.
The best explanation for this sudden spate of deaths among RU-486 patients appears to involve the immunosuppressant properties of the abortion pill RU-486. A woman's immune system is normally capable of protecting her from deadly bacteria like Clostridium sordellii, but RU-486 appears to compromise her immune system, so that it is unable to help her fight off such infections.
Signs of her infection such as pain, bleeding, cramping, nausea and other forms of gastrointestinal distress may be misread because they mimic side effects that ordinarily accompany chemical abortions. Clostridium sordellii infections often come without fevers, so that both patients and doctors may fail to recognize anything unusual until it is too late. This is clearly what happened in the cases of many of these women who died.
The cases being discussed may represent only the tip of the iceberg of this drug's problems. In addition to the four American women who died of Clostridium infections, a Swedish teen bled to death and a Tennessee woman died when her undetected ectopic pregnancy ruptured. Nearly a thousand women have suffered complications after taking RU-486, many of them severe and life-threatening, requiring transfusions, emergency surgery, or other interventions.
The abortion industry likes to contrast these against what it says are over half a million safe uses of the drug, but these figures are based on sales from the distributor to prescribers, not on field tallies of actual uses by patients, so uses may be grossly inflated. Thousands of doses that the distributor reports as safe uses may be sitting on clinic shelves collecting dust.
By the same token, deaths and other adverse events may be greatly underestimated, since women are more likely to seek treatment at their local emergency room than at the clinic where they received the pills. A woman may not tell the physician treating her in the ER that she has taken RU-486. She may not be able to.
Healthy women who have taken these pills have already died, and hundreds more have suffered serious adverse events. What further evidence do we need to tell us this drug is not safe and ought to be pulled from the market?
