Recent publicity for abortion drug RU486 has given women assurances of its safety. The drug is promoted as do-it-yourself, easy, private and ”more natural”. In this pro-RU486 spin, the voices of women harmed by the chemical cocktail have been drowned out.
”Rose”, 27, from South Australia, shares her experience in the new preface of RU-486: Misconceptions, Myths and Morals by Renate Klein, Janice Raymond and Lynette Dumble. She was told it would be easy and quick. ”The worst part … was the sheer amount of time it took for me to ‘terminate’ my baby: every large clot of blood – which I could literally feel passing through my insides … was a reminder of the fact I was terminating a baby, for which I felt hugely saddened.
”It was three days of nausea, high temperature, sweating, cramping, lots of blood, distress and swirling emotions. I would never ever go through that again.” Rose bled for another three weeks.
An unnamed 25-year-old American woman described her experience after taking RU486 at six weeks. ”I was in excruciating physical pain for at least 12 hours straight and I was bleeding through my pants, but I was in so much pain I couldn’t even clean myself,” she says. ”I vomited continuously … I couldn’t speak, eat, drink, sit up, and had difficulty breathing … I thought I was going to die …
”I was told I would have emotional instability for a few weeks because of the hormonal chemical imbalance that the drug causes. I have experienced severe emotional fluctuation ever since … I would never have taken this had I been properly informed.”
Norine Dworkin-McDaniel’s story ”I was betrayed by a pill” was published in Marie Claire in 2007. ”Nothing prepared me for the searing, gripping, squeezing pain that ripped through my belly … For 90 minutes I was disoriented, nauseated, and, between crushing waves of contractions … racing from the bed to the bathroom with diarrhoea,” she wrote.
”The next night, I started bleeding. I bled for 14 days. A follow-up ultrasound confirmed I’d aborted.” She developed ”huge cystic boils that soon covered my neck, shoulders, and back” and suffered ”an utter lack of ability to do anything more strenuous than sleep or lie on the couch”.
Since the death of his 18-year-old daughter Holly in 2003 from an infection after an RU486 abortion, Monty Patterson has lobbied the US Congress to pass ”Holly’s Law”, calling for the suspension and review of the drug.
In Australia, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee has agreed to a request from Marie Stopes Health, a subsidiary of Marie Stopes International, to list Mifepristone Linepharma (RU486) and the misoprostol GyMiso on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for termination up to 49 days gestation. From August 1, both drugs are available on the PBS.
Marie Stopes’ record in following up women who have been prescribed the abortion drug is questionable. On March 19, 2012, it was reported that a woman had died sometime in 2010 at a Marie Stopes clinic. In a study by Marie Stopes’ staffers published in the Medical Journal of Australia (September 2012), this death was callously attributed to the woman’s own negligence because she didn’t ”seek medical advice” and died of sepsis.
Where was the follow-up by Marie Stopes? There was no coronial inquiry.
In May 2012, the Therapeutic Goods Administration told a Senate committee it didn’t collect information on RU486-related deaths of women overseas. Perhaps it doesn’t think it important enough? As at April 30, 2011, the US Food and Drug Administration had held detailed reports on 14 US deaths and five deaths elsewhere, with two further deaths reported since then.
Noting that only one in 10 adverse events is reported, the FDA has recorded 2207 adverse events, including 612 hospitalisations, 58 ectopic pregnancies, 339 women who experienced blood loss requiring transfusions and 256 infections, 48 of which were ”severe”.
Here, the TGA has been informed of 132 cases of ongoing pregnancy requiring surgical abortion, 23 cases of haemorrhage requiring blood transfusion and 599 cases of incomplete abortion requiring surgery. This means about 1 in 30 women will need a second termination procedure. Other negative outcomes include cervical tearing and uterine perforation.
A South Australian study found women undergoing ”medical” abortion had more symptoms, reported higher pain scores and had higher rates of emergency admissions. After discharge they had more nausea and diarrhoea. According to an earlier British study, women who saw the foetus were most susceptible to psychological distress, including nightmares, flashbacks, and unwanted thoughts related to the procedure.
While Health Minister Tanya Plibersek says that the drug will be an advantage for women in remote and under-resourced areas, the lack of nearby emergency facilities is a reason not to use it, medical bodies say. Regardless of one’s views on abortion, pushing this drug combo as simple is disrespectful of a woman’s right to know what she might face.
As published in the Sun-Herald Aug 11 2013
13 Responses
Dear Melinda,
Could you please clarify who/what is promoting the mifepristone/misoprostol combination in Australia as you’ve stated? I can’t find much in the literature being published for Australian health professionals about the combination being ‘do-it-yourself, easy, private and ”more natural”’, except in a paper referenced by NPS RADAR, and that was only to say a number of UK women receiving either surgical or medical termination of pregnancy ‘viewed the (medical abortion) process as simpler and more natural’ (NPS 2013). There’s a lot else in that NPS article as well, which addresses the failure rate and complications that you’ve also mentioned.
I’m worried about it (as I would be if anyone were misinformed about the risks of their therapy), but so far I haven’t heard what you’ve said is happening. If there is someone or a group misinforming the public about them, we need to call them out on it and correct them.
NPS. (2013). Mifepristone (Mifepristone Linepharma) followed by misoprostol (GyMiso) for medical termination of pregnancy of up to 49 days’ gestation. Retrieved 12/08/13, from http://www.nps.org.au/publications/health-professional/nps-radar/latest-issue/mifepristone-misoprostol
Chris, a woman receives the one Mifepristone Linepharma pill from her abortion provider and gets the 4 pills of GyMiso to take home and to let dissolve in her mouth 24-36 hours later. By that time she may be at work, at school, on the bus… NOT under direct medical supervision at a clinic. That’s why one can call it an unpredictable DIY abortion. As Melinda pointed out in her article, some women have terrible adverse effects – and the problem is that no woman knows if she will be the one with huge blood loss (needing a blood transfusion), excruciating pain and nausea,sepsis – and without the pills terminating the pregnancy (it only works in 92 to 95%, compared with 99% in a suction abortion). I have written at great length about this in ‘RU 486: ‘Misconceptions, Myths and Morals’ (with Janice Raymond and Lynette Dumble), just re-issued with an updated 100 page Preface. Available at http://www.spinifexpress.com.au/Bookstore/
And for the record we all support women undergoing an abortion if that is her decision. But we are very critical of a dangerous, substandard pill cocktail – as is Melinda.
I’ve had multiple miscarriages before and I’ve used misoprostol. It’s pretty awful. Large clots, lots of pain and heaps of bleeding. Ongoing bleeding for 6 weeks because some tissue had ‘retained’. Using it in combination with another drug and without medical advice and supervision….unimaginable. It would be dangerous and very traumatic!
Abortion drugs are marketed on the basis they better meet women’s need for reproductive ‘choice’, accessible abortion and privacy, but in actual fact they better meet the profit needs of pharmaceutical companies like MS Health. This company was created in January 2012 to profit from the decision of the Australian government in August 2012 to subsidise the supply of abortion drugs it holds licenses for. It’s a shelf company of an international abortion provider, which is its only shareholder. This provider profits more from abortion drugs than medical abortion services because the overheads are less–no salaries to pay clinic staff or lease costs. This company sells franchise rights to local abortion providers in Third World countries under the marketing rhetoric of ‘reproductive choice for women’. I think surgical abortion should be maintained as an easily-accessible and free procedure for women in every society, but its commercialisation and control by Big Pharma through the introduction of abortion drugs is an ongoing threat to women’s health and wellbeing.
This doesn’t even have a spot on what women go through for a pregnancy, or when they are raped, forced to carry and bear the result, and birth that result in pain, terror and punishment, then go through a lifetime of blame.
If you were to offer me that pill combo today, knowing what I know will happen without it and DID happen, I would take it once a week until I had a result.
You want the truth, how about lying in your own shit, blood, piss, vomit and sweat, screaming and crying and having a fetus torn out of you because you were unable to ‘deliver’ it, having instruments used on you, a line up of residents shoving their arms up you AS you contracted, so they could learn, and a slash made from your vagina into your anus.
How about living your whole life after with no family, no speaking to being shunned, called names, having every new person you know being told, eventually, your children having “your mother is…” thrown in their faces.
Every time, give me the pill combo.
Every time. And tell this, when you tell about the pill, so women get to have the TRUTH on both sides.
I’m so sorry to hear you had such a traumatic experience of birth. That’s just terrible. I hope your child is OK? It sounds like you have suffered a lot. I’m sorry people have been so cruel. I wish you could have had more support. Women often don’t get the support they need. It’s so wrong. Thanks for sharing your experience here, I know it wouldn’t have been easy….
Thank you, Melinda, for giving a platform to the voices of women who have not had the ‘safe and easy’ experience they were sold. I am continually astonished at the willingness of so many commentators, politicians, health care providers, and feminists to ignore these women and pretend that their experiences aren’t important. As you said, it shouldn’t matter what your views on abortion when it comes to giving women information they deserve to have. Anything less isn’t ‘choice’.
the pill, your experience sounds devastating. I’m so sorry that you had to live that.
That’s not what this article is about, though. Wanting women to be fully informed about the history, potential risks, and side effects of RU486 is not the same as wanting them to endure forced pregnancy, birth trauma, and social exclusion. Nobody wants that – nobody here, anyway. Nobody who really cares about women. All women deserve better, which is MTR’s point – how can we consent to our participation in any part of sex, pregnancy, or motherhood, if crucial information and support is withheld from us? How can we make it clear that women are more than just vessels for a fetus, if their experiences are denied and their voices silenced in order to sell ideology in tablet form? Let’s talk about RU486, choice, rights, babies, all these things. But let’s do it with our eyes wide open and everyone’s voices given the chance to be heard.
Being suprised after that this was physically horrific? C’mon. Saying one was sick for three days or a week??? Well I think that’s to be expected.
And the information IS available, at the drug website, in women’s fora, feminist blogs and groups, searchable online. Prior to the internet, drug info was NOT readily avaiable. It’s there now, especially in feminist sites.
There is a strong faction working to take this pill away from women, trying to make women afraid of what they will experience. Sick? Yes. Pain? Yes. Shock? Yes. You’re having an abortion, but it’s NOTHING compared ot even a normal hospital delivery and the after effects.
Some of the comments here are looking like part of that faction.
It looks like my comment is not going in. I’ll try again.
You give yourself away here: “…sell ideology in tablet form.”
So abortion rights for women is ideology. Well well Melinda. You have an anti-abortionist pushing a male centric, women-hating perspective here.
The tablet is not idealogy, it’s freedom because decades of conversation with the fetus fetishists has got us very little. Currently, abortion rights and other reproductive health rights are under attack in the U.S. and Canada. Women’s bodily autonomy is a catch phrase not a truth or actual thing. It doesn’t exist, is always under seige by those who truly are pushing an idealogy, that of the Christian right. If that’s not a tautology.
I support abortion on demand, as birth-control, up until the fetus is delivered. That means, if she can’t get this pill, I support not criminalizing women who practise infanticide post delivery, because they are truly given no choice in a culture when we see 11 yr old girls being forced to give birth to a rapist’s child. As I did.
You also give yourself away when you “hope the child is ok” in your response to a raped brutalized woman who was raped (force), forced to carry it, forced to bear it, forced to live a lifetime of nothing like your fake concern here. Abuse. A latter day Rehetaeh.
You are not discussing how to get a safe pill which might be valid. No. You are discussing, or attempting to, how to stop women from having such a pill, with your fake concern for women like me.
Women like me kill unwanted fetuses post birth through the ages, infanticide, we always have. In aboriginal cultures women killed the fetus, because the tribe could not feed another mouth in starving times, and men will stick their dicks in women recreationally, without consideration for food in the mouths of the ones who already exist. That’s a woman’s concern, among aboriginal people. (I am, aboriginal).
We’ll do it again if we can. And I will support the women not being criminalized over it, because you support the woman’s abuse in service of your idealogy.
All over the internet there is discussion of abortion methods and availability. Women are looking after women. We know how to do it, and will make sure our daughters do too, because of misogyny and racism, we will use it and not rely on there being a pill for us, with people concerned about the ‘child’ over the woman.
Here’s my point of view in this discussion. Let’s see if it gets in this time. Melinda.
If you want to be considered on this topic Melinda, how about comparing the risks of pregnancy, any old pregnancy, with risks of this pill. The latter, for what? Three dfays discomfort. Oh MY GOD how inhumane.
The risks of intercourse, pregnancy, delivering a fetus, and the following five years (post partum depression).
I see you’re still selectively moderating. Wouldn’t want any truth telling here.
@ the pill
You seem not to realize that there are other methods of abortion. Surgical abortion is quick (less than an hour, probably), pretty painless with minimal after effects. I know because I had one, and was up on my feet the next day, basically normal.
Three days discomfort you say? did you miss the part where women DIED? Would that be preferable to you?
You had a really shitty experience; ‘sorry’ doesn’t really cut it, I mean there are not words for that.
But regardless of this, suggesting that women should risk death to abort when there are safer and easier methods available makes no sense.
I would also hesitate in taking such a powerful drug.
Perhaps vacuum aspiration (suction method) of abortion is the best bet for most women wanting to terminate. It’s generally done between Weeks 6 and 12 with a very safe record.