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Last Christmas Eve, a 32 year old Idaho woman took RU-486 in an attempt to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. This January, police found the fetal remains on her property and charged her with inducing her own abortion, a crime in the state. The case was dismissed due to lack of evidence, but not before everyone in town ostracized the woman for her acts. Now, some state officials want the authority to charge the woman again, and they're prepared to use the case as a means to issue another challenge to Roe v. Wade in the Supreme Court. And we just won Depressing Abortion Story Bingo. More »
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Might be an unhappy new year for the poor and geographically disadvantaged abortion-seeking women of Iowa: a program that's helped thousands to receive the abortion pill RU-486 over the Internet might be eliminated, if incoming antiabortion legislators get their way. More »
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Tegan Leach has been found not guilty of inducing her own abortion — but the premier of her Australian state says abortion laws there are unlikely to change. More »
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A woman in Queensland, Australia, has been charged with "illegally obtaining her own abortion" for taking the abortion drug RU-486. If convicted, she could face up to seven years in prison. More »
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Ten years after the FDA approval of mifepristone for medication abortions, it's a good moment to think about what its availability has changed — and what it hasn't. More »
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A French company wants to market "ella," a drug that prevents pregnancy for up to five days after unprotected sex, as an emergency contraceptive. But critics say it's more like an abortion pill. More »
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Cara Buckley and Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times delved into the still-existant world of underground abortions this weekend, focusing on New York City's tight-knit and Catholic Dominican community. More »
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What is it about the "Global Population, Magnitude Of" thing that so vexes the world's rich people? I'm asking in light of the food crisis and the energy crisis bringing back that old "Malthusian population crisis" fear. I'm also asking in light of my kinda recent discovery that the American rights to the RU-486 abortion pill are owned by some super-secretive subsidiary of the Rockefeller-founded Population Council. (Which is, by the way, charging too much money for it.) But mainly I'm asking because I just read this NYRB piece on two new books about the population control movement in the '50s and '60s which, among other things, taught me this about the challenge Western family planners faced in getting (and sometimes coercing) Third worlders into embracing birth control: More »
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This is Rep. Ray Salva, Missouri Democrat. An early supporter of John Edwards, the Catholic and lifetime Missouri resident is a member of the Optimist's Club and known to be a friend of the environment, the homeless and the eroding middle-class. But we write about him for a much more baffling reason: his addition of an amendment to a statehouse anti-methamphetamine bill. The bill was your typical "make buying Sudafed a pain in the ass" measure. But Salva's amendment would do something entirely unrelated: it would add mifepristone, the RU-486 abortion pill, to the state's list of Schedule 1 Controlled Substances, the list where substances find themselves if they have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. "What other drug could be more harmful (than one that takes) a life?" It's not a bad question: Salva, no stranger to substance abuse, was arrested for drunk driving last February; surely the sort of behavior that could wind up taking a human life. More »
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Three months after a Wisconsin man reportedly laced his pregnant girlfriend's food with the abortificient RU-486, comes news that a 27-year-old Swedish man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for doing the exact same thing. The unnamed Swede reportedly attempted to make his girlfriend of eight years miscarry by grinding up abortion-inducing pills and mixing them into her yogurt. "The woman ate the yoghurt and suffered severe stomach pains and vaginal bleeding," reports CBS News (via AP). "When she later realized what she had eaten, she decided to have an abortion, fearing that the fetus had been permanently damaged by the pills." Although the story serves to underscore the reality that pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to domestic violence — expectant mothers are more likely to be victims of murder than to die of any other cause — it also raises an important issue: does the prosecution of men who attempt to induce miscarriage in women help the cause of anti-choice activists? More »
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Fetuses may be able to feel pain as early as eighteen weeks, claims a story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. (Also in the weekend's Times: a review of a book that makes the scientific argument that life begins at conception. Fun!) So anyway, the story explores the highly-specialized world of fetal surgery, a world rife with tales of 23-week old fetuses flinching and recoiling at the touch of surgeons' scalpels, and in which it has now become common practice to offer fetuses anesthesia, in part as the result of new research that shows that fetuses as young as 18 weeks would show a massive flood of stress hormones when undergoing fetal procedures sans anesthesia. The story is an interesting reexamination of the long-accepted notion that fetuses feel no pain, and the attendant controversy surrounding the ramifications on a thorny little political debate known as the "abortion issue." And as with all stories that dare to go beyond the black/white of the life begins at conception/birth debate, I found it illuminating. But even if you buy the doctors' assertions, only about 5% of the country's abortions are conducted on fetuses that feel pain. More »
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The state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical manufacturers Shanghai Hualian, the only suppliers of the abortion pill RU-486 to the United States, have paralyzed or injured over 200 cancer patients in China with tainted leukemia drugs. According to the New York Times, the factory that produced the contaminated drugs has been closed, and the factory that makes RU-486 (aka mifepristone) is an hour away. This is the first time the F.D.A. is publicly announcing the American supplier of the abortion pill; the Times reports that the F.D.A. kept the manufacturers a secret because of security concerns stemming from "sometimes violent opposition to abortion." More »
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In 1973, the World Trade center opened its doors, synthetic fabrics were a must, the Watergate hearings were televised, Adrien Brody was born, and abortion was legalized. Today, on the 35th anniversary of the landmark Roe vs. Wade decision, the cultural pendulum has shifted rightward (according to L.A. Times contributors Francis Kissling and Kate Michelman, "Twenty years ago, being pro-life was déclassé. Now it is a respectable point of view"). According to a Pew poll, 22% of young adults favor a total ban on abortion, 87% of counties have no abortion provider, and pro-life teenagers are "spiritually adopting" fetuses and telling LA Times reporters, "I feel like we're all survivors of abortion." More »
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Wisconsin resident Manishkumar Patel, 34, was charged first-degree intentional homicide of an unborn child, among other charges, after he secretly slipped RU-486 (aka the abortion pill) into his 39-year-old pregnant girlfriend's food and drink, causing her to have a miscarriage. The girlfriend, Darshana Patel (no relation to Manishkumar) became suspicious of her BF after she saw him "frantically" mixing something into her smoothie. She didn't drink the smoothie, but had been consuming other food and drinks he'd made for her since she'd announced her pregnancy. Thinking he could've caused the miscarriage, as well as the miscarriage she suffered last year, Darshana brought the smoothie to the police, who had it tested and found traces of the drug. They searched his home, and found many more pills, which Manishkumar — who is married with a child — said he had shipped from India. It's too bad Darshana isn't able to take the Plan C pill. [JS Online] More »
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