Lesley Regan, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), is delighted at the news that women will be able to self-administer abortion pills in their own homes. She is on record as claiming that having an abortion is no different to having a bunion removed.
Ironically, with this change she has been campaigning for, women will soon realise abortion is definitely not the same as removing a bunion when they see the baby they have to flush down the toilet.
One young girl describes her own experience of having a medical abortion at home: ‘I had to go from two appointments for the abortion on the Thursday and the Saturday. I took the first pill and then went back on the Saturday for the second. I think the best way of describing what happened next is to read out a bit from my boyfriend’s version of events:
‘The day she took the final pill and came back to my flat to wait for it to pass truly drew a new line in the sand. The hours of pain she suffered, it utterly ripped me apart to see her writhing in agony, interspersed with trips to the toilet as the process started. It culminated in one trip from which she didn’t return, all I heard was sobs, drained of energy she couldn’t even cry with the force the pain deserved. I soon discovered that it wasn’t the pain the sobs were for, it was for what she had seen in the toilet. A recognisable shape. Then flushed away.’
But say we ignore any possible emotional damage to women (that not all will experience, of course) and instead look at the claims being made that medical abortions are safe and that self-administering the abortion pill is progress for women. What does the peer-reviewed evidence show us?
To explain the process, in a medical abortion an oral dose of mifepristone is given at a clinic/hospital which will (usually) kill the fetus. Women leave the hospital or clinic then, under the current system, return up to 48 hours later to be administered misoprostol, either orally or vaginally. This expels the dead fetus. The forthcoming change is that women will not have to return to the clinic but can take the second pill outside any clinical setting or medical oversight. It sounds simple and safe, so what is my concern?
1. Medical abortions are not as safe as surgical
This is rarely acknowledged, yet all the evidence is clear. The largest and most accurate study of medical abortions, a Finnish study of 42,600 women, found that women had four times as many serious complications after medication abortions than surgical abortions: 20 per cent compared with 5.6 per cent.
For medical abortions after 12 weeks, surgical intervention rates vary between studies, reaching, in one UK multicentre study, up to 53 per cent, according to the RCOG.
Research by pro-abortion authors found that for women over seven weeks the failure rate can be up to 33 per cent.
2. Self-administering abortion pills is medically risky
A leading campaigner for abortion, obstetrician Peter Boylan, has admitted: ‘There are serious dangers when women take [abortion pills] without supervision. We have knowledge of women who have taken them in excessive dosage and that can result in catastrophe for a woman such as a rupture of the uterus with very significant haemorrhage . . . And if that happens in the privacy of a woman’s home or perhaps in an apartment somewhere, that can have very, very serious consequences for women. So, it’s really important that these tablets are . . . dealt with in a supervised way.’
One peer-reviewed study of self-administering pills found that 63 per cent had incomplete abortion. Surgical evacuation had to be performed in 68 per cent of the patients.
With self-administered pills, there is no control over who takes the pills; where the pills are taken; whether the pills are taken; when in the process the pills are taken; if the girl is vulnerable or in an abusive/coercive relationship; if abuse or coercion is involved in taking the pills, or if another (competent) adult is present.
3. There is no demand for self-administration of medical abortion
Despite claims by abortion campaigners, there is no hard evidence or data showing that women are having problems with the current arrangements. Campaigners rely instead on (limited) anecdotal evidence. The reality is that onset of bleeding is within four to six hours after taking the second of the two pills, giving sufficient time for most women to get home. Surgical abortion is an option for those who cannot get home before bleeding begins, including those who cannot access medical services quickly after the abortion. Medical abortion is contraindicated for women with transport problems or issues.
So why the campaign to change the current situation?
This is just one step towards a longer-term goal for abortion lobbyists, to make abortions as easy as possible, using nurses, pharmacists and internet suppliers, and to remove legal restrictions. Abortion providers have obvious financial and ideological vested interests in increasing numbers of procedures. And our government knows that it is cheaper to pay for a couple of pills than a surgical abortion.
It seems that ‘progress’ today means moving abortions from unsupervised back-streets into unsupervised bathrooms.
