The Abortion Industry’s “Salvation”

On several fronts, the abortion industry now seems poised to again sacrifice women for political gain.

Currently, two of their biggest efforts are trying to pass legislation allowing non-physicians to perform abortions, and trying to find an effective chemical abortion.

Regarding the first issue, we found a rather interesting phenomenon.

On November 4, 1995, Planned Parenthood held its 79th Annual Conference, at which it bestowed its highest honor, The Margaret Sanger Award, on Minnesota abortionist Jane Hodgson. Interestingly, at a NAF meeting in 1990, Hodgson said that, “When I first started doing abortions, I took my boards in obstetrics and gynecology, and therefore I knew I was competent to do it. After I had done my first few hundred, I realized how silly I had been. At this point, having done somewhere around 12,000 procedures, I’m beginning to think I’m reasonably competent.” The obvious dichotomy is how a board-certified obstetrician / gynecologist has to perform 12,000 abortions before she feels “reasonably competent” while NAF and Planned Parenthood claim that nurses and physician’s assistants can pick it up in no time.

There has also been at least one study showing that complication rates are significantly higher when abortions are performed by residents rather than licensed physicians. In one study, cervical injury was found to be twice as likely to occur in abortions carried out by residents than in those carried out by physicians. If these studies are accurate, it seems highly unlikely that the safety of abortion would improve by allowing them be performed by nurses and physician’s assistants who have even less medical training.

For the abortion industry to seriously propose that the standards for providing abortion be lowered demonstrates the utter disdain they have for American women. As Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the inventor of the French “abortion pill,” RU-486, said, “To demedicalize abortion by removing doctors from the process – it’s insane!”

That, of course, brings us to their quest for a chemical abortion.

The most public manifestation of this effort has been their love affair with Baulieu’s pill, and they are feverishly working to see it made available in the United States. In the meantime, they’re experimenting with chemical abortions by combining two drugs, methotrexate and misoprostol, which have not been approved as abortifiacients. Methotrexate is intended for the treatment of cancer, sever rheumatoid arthritis, and severe psoriasis. The Physician’s Desk Reference (PDR) contains the following warning:

“Methotrexate should be used only by physicians whose knowledge and experience includes the use of antimetabolite therapy… Because of the possibility of serious toxic reactions, the patient should be informed by the physician of the risks involved and should be under a physician’s constant supervision. Deaths have been reported with the use of methotrexate in the treatment of [certain diseases]… Methotrexate use should be restricted to patients with severe, recalcitrant, disabling disease, which is not adequately responsive to other forms of therapy, and only when the diagnosis has been established and after appropriate consultation.”

Among other warnings in the PDR are that methotrexate can cause hemorrhagic enteritis and death from intestinal perforation, unexpectedly severe (sometimes fatal) marrow suppression, and gastrointestinal toxicity. There is also evidence that methotrexate can cause chromosomal damage to human bone marrow cells.

According to the PDR, the other drug, misoprostol, can cause incomplete miscarriages, leading to potentially dangerous bleeding, hospitalization, surgery, infertility, or maternal death. In studies of women undergoing elective termination of pregnancy during the first trimester, it caused either partial or complete expulsion of the products of conception in only 11 percent of the subjects and increased uterine bleeding in 41 percent.

Clearly, this methotrexate / misoprostol abortion is just the latest example of the abortion industry’s willingness to play Russian roulette with the lives of American women.

When the abortion industry insists that this new procedure is the latest “silver bullet,” perhaps we should all remember that they said the same thing about saline. After all, the stakes are pretty high.