Tuesday, January 9

Surgery is very dangerous. Pills are less dangerous. Save the only pill alternative to surgery for this particular health problem.

While browsing proposed House legislation because I wanted to see if there was an inflation-indexed version of the minimum wage bill instead of the "clean" yet unindexed House Resolution 2, I noticed that there was something called the "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2007."

I'm still reading the bill and reading up on it, and so far it looks like some congresspeople think the drug is dangerous (potentially deadly) and should be pulled off the market until it can be studied better.
They claim that it was hurried to approval and that it really needed to be studied longer in the first place, and better late than never for pulling it off the market and studying it.

It looks like there were also a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2003" ("Last Action: Nov 14, 2003: Referred to the Subcommittee on Health ... This bill never became law.") and a "RU-486 Suspension and Review Act of 2005" ("Last Action: Mar 3, 2005: Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pension ... This bill never became law").

I thought many of my readers would want to know. Though I haven't had an abortion myself, I do remember reading "BB"'s detailed accounts of an abortion on RU-486 after she was denied emergency contraception after a condom broke (partly because many of the medical staff in her rural area thought that emergency contraception was the same thing as RU-486!) She covered the physical feelings of it as well as all of her emotions and the time she spent going over pros and cons and making her decision.

(If you're curious to hear more details, she had to go the condoms-only route because the way her hormones are make it so she can't be healthy on hormonal contraception, and the way her vagina is shaped makes it so she can't use barrier methods inside herself. What's more, she had to go the abortion route once contraception failed because she'd been told by multiple doctors that another pregnancy would probably kill her, and she had 3 kids to raise.)

Thinking of people like BB, I want to say,

"Listen, yes, some people have died because they took RU-486, but other people have avoided dying because they took RU-486.

"How is it different from any other medicine in that respect?

"If you let legislators pull it off the market while it's being studied, people in the latter camp will die while it's away.

"I have a hunch that there are more of them than there are women who'd die because of taking the drug."


If you agree with me, please write your Congressperson and encourage her/him to table House Resolution 63. And/Or please pass on the above reasoning on your own blogs.

( Additional keywords for search engines: mifepristone misoprostol )

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