In the February 16 issue of Newsweek, editor, columnist, and abortion proponent Anna Quindlen writes a pro-medical abortions column. About it my friend Colleen wrote...

Imagine selling illegal drugs that trigger an illegal, abnormal, potentially life-threatening bodily function with a 10+% failure rate requiring unguaranteed surgical intervention.

I sounded the alarm 3 weeks ago when reading that Women on Waves sells the RU-486 abortion cocktail (mifeprostone with a misoprostol chaser) over the Internet in countries where abortion is illegal.

Now, according to several sources today including Sky News:

Women living in countries where abortion is restricted... are using the internet to buy abortion pills that allow them to have a termination at home.

More than one in 10 customers on one of the most well-known websites needed a surgical procedure after taking the medication, a medical study has found....

The New York Times reports today on its front page that the sole manufacturer of RU-486, a Chinese state-owned drug company named Shanghai Hualian, "is at the center of a nationwide drug scandal" involving contaminated leukemia drugs that caused paralysis in 200+ Chinese patients and an attempted cover-up afterward....

This is a follow up to my November 29 post on Manishkumar Patel, accused of slipping his mistress RU-486 on 2 occasions, once in a smoothie, to cause her to abort twice.

Patel has apparently jumped bond in WI and fled to India, leaving friends and family who posted his $750,000 bail high and dry. A Sify story states his formerly pregnant girlfriend has claimed part of the money. Get this, his wife supposedly took off with him.

What losers, all.

[HT: moderator MK; photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

This guy faces life in prison for slipping his girlfriend RU-486 in a smoothie and causing her to abort (not "miscarry") twice, when if she had wanted to take the pill to abort she would have been federally protected. He also gave her the drug, which is not to be prescribed after 49 days, at 15 weeks. From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

A 34-year-old Kaukauna man who owns several hotels and gas stations in the Fox Valley and northeastern Wisconsin is accused of giving his girlfriend the abortion pill RU-486 because he didn't want children.

The 39-year-old Kaukauna woman couldn't understand why she suddenly miscarried twice especially after her regular medical check-ups showed her pregnancies were going well....

As reported by Family Research Council today:

On Wednesday the New England Journal of Medicine published a study examining the effect of the abortifacient, RU-486, on women's chances of later having tubal (ectopic) pregnancies or miscarriages....

The results were released to Time, the Associated Press, and Reuters, which splashed grossly misleading headlines like: "Study Finds Abortion Pill Safe" (Time).

Actually, the researchers concluded only that there was the same risk to women and child of future miscarriages if they had used RU-486 or had a surgical abortion.

Stopping on that point, as Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, quipped, "This study is like comparing whether it is worse to burn your hand on a gas stove or an electric stove. You still end up burned." Continuing on:

The new study is problematic because it did not examine other, short-term risks, and it did not compare RU-486 and surgical abortion patients to women with no abortion history.

Thus, this study says nothing about future pregnancy outcomes for RU-486 patients versus women who never have abortions - a true measure of longer-term RU-486 safety.

The authors, including an NIH scientist, laid down the following unbelievable spin to explain the omission: "....women who have never had an abortion tend to have a different pattern of income, smoking rates and other health-related behaviors that would make a comparison difficult...."

Riiiiiight. More likely - but not politically correct - is that women who have abortions have a higher risk of future negative pregnancy outcomes. HHS Secretary Leavitt needs to look into having this study re-done using proper methodology and unbiased scientists.

The authors basically said women who don't abort are higher class, as they say, "don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, and don't run with boys who do." Don't sleep around either.

Are abortion supporters going to take characterization that lying down?

When I testified before an FDA committee opposing making the morning-after pill available without a prescription, I referred to a Bangkok Post story that revealed men were slipping it to girlfriends and wives without knowing.

Here's another example, based on a true story (addendum, 5:10p: about a guy slipping his girlfriend the abortion drug RU-486). According to e-urban legend, an ASU student made this short film, and her professor censored it. The background song, "Mad World," is from the "Donnie Darko" soundtrack.

[Hat tip: Bettnet.com via Andrew]

Last week, the US Senate unanimously approved SC Republican Jim DeMint's amendment to the FDA reauthorization bill stating the agency must have risk assessment and solution strategies in place with the manufacturer of RU-486 within seven months after the bill takes effect.

Pro-aborts in the Democrat-controlled body must have finally conducted a self risk assessment and determined they were close to being labeled as anti-women's health and safety if they didn't do something about RU-486....