As 'Morning-After' Pill Casualties Mount, CWA Urges FDA Withdrawal of Abortion Drug
by Rusty Pugh
August 5, 2005
(AgapePress) - A pro-life women's group says the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is withholding information that a dangerous abortion drug has caused near fatal injuries in hundreds of women.Late last month the FDA admitted that five women in the United States and Canada have died after developing complications from taking the so-called "morning-after" pill, also known as RU-486 or Mifepristone. The drug has been linked to, among other things, life-threatening cervical infections -- some of which are not detected until it is too late.
But while the FDA did confirm the five documented deaths, neither the federal agency nor Danco Laboratories, the company that makes the abortion pill, disclosed the fact that RU-486 has caused severe health problems for more than 600 women. Wendy Wright, senior policy director for Concerned Women for America, believes the FDA is keeping some crucial information from the public in an effort to protect itself.
"We discovered through a Freedom of Information [Act] request that there have been over 600 adverse events -- complications suffered by women after taking RU-486," Wright says. "And actually it's more than that that," she adds.
Wendy Wright | |
The pro-family advocate explains that the initial 600 events uncovered were only "the first batch of these reports that we received from the FDA last fall." Since that time, she says her group has done another FOIA request, "and just last week received an additional 262 adverse events reports, which we still need to go through. It will take a while to go through all of those."CWA asked two OB/GYN physicians to assess the reports, and the doctors found included some 220 cases in which patients who had taken RU-486 suffered hemorrhages that were either life-threatening or extremely serious, many of them requiring blood transfusions. Also, 392 of the reports indicated that the women required surgery -- often under emergency conditions -- to repair damage resulting from their abortions.
Wright feels FDA officials need to be more up front with the public about the risks associated with the "morning-after" pill. She says the federal agency has an obligation to be forthcoming with the information it has about the risk of death and severe health problems that have been linked to the dangerous abortion drug.
Moreover, the CWA spokeswoman is calling on the FDA to pull Mifepristone from the market while its purported safety is reviewed. But so far, she says, the only action the federal agency responsible for approving this dangerous drug has taken to protect the public from its health risks has been to enhance the warning label on the box -- a measure she insists is simply not strong enough.
"Women trust that the FDA is doing its job to protect our health," Wright points out. "To continue this trust, the FDA should withdraw its approval of RU-486 before more women die," she says.
Rusty Pugh, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
