Home » blogs » Prometheus 6's blog

Oh, pull this

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on May 17, 2006 - 6:38pm.
on

They want to pull condoms, ferchrissake.

Abortion Foes Want RU-486 Pill Pulled
Deaths of Several Women Are Cited
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 17, 2006; A03

 

Opponents of the abortion pill RU-486 are mounting a renewed campaign to force the Food and Drug Administration to pull the drug from the market, arguing that it has proved to be unexpectedly dangerous to women.

The effort focuses on the deaths in recent years of four to eight young women who had taken the medication, and especially the four deaths that involved a common but rarely fatal bacterium, Clostridium sordelli . A congressional subcommittee has scheduled a hearing today on what it called "the unsafe characteristics of RU-486."

But research into those lethal infections has unearthed new information that makes it less clear that complications from the abortion pill, sold as Mifeprex, caused the deaths.

The FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have implicated the clostridium bacterium in the deaths of more than a dozen other women after childbirth or miscarriage -- making it unclear whether there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the abortion pill and the infections.

"We think it's premature to say there is any direct relationship between [RU-486] and these clostridium deaths," said Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA's Office of New Drugs. "The situation is far more complicated than we originally imagined, and far more broad than anything limited to this drug."

 

Prometheus 6's blog | latest article | previous | next

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
What About Viagra?
Submitted by qusan on May 17, 2006 - 7:57pm.
Viagra kills far more men than complications due to RU-486 use does women. No mad rush to ban those little pills. 
More US women die annually
Submitted by Ourstorian on May 18, 2006 - 12:24pm.

More US women die annually in childbirth, too (approximately one per day). The maternal death rate of black females in childbirth is three times higher than that of white females.

And then there's the newborn death rate in the US, which should be a national scandal, but which gets almost no serious coverage by the corporate media.