The FDA kept the news of who would be providing the kill pills secret as long as they could, aiding the marketing campaign for the start-up U.S. distributor, Danco.
For eight years, the FDA has desperately tried to entice a pharmaceutical company here in the U.S. to bite. No takers.
Finally, a Chinese company took the bait, a company that’s been producing the abortion pill for Chinese women for nine years now. This pill, mind you, has long been an integral part of China's notorious population-control program.
In order to protect the Hua Lian Pharmaceutical factory from protests, the Clinton administration has kept its identity (and nationality) quiet. Funny, considering the Chinese government doesn't allow protests. Just ask the peaceful members of the spiritual movement Falun Gong, more and more of whom are dying at the hands of Chinese authorities.
Clearly, the manufacturing site of this latest innovation of the reproductive rights movement was meant to be a state secret, but this shouldn't come as a surprise. It’s far from the only thing that’s been kept hidden from American women.
Just this same week the press was all abuzz as word leaked out that the latest issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association — not exactly a propaganda arm of the pro-life movement — reports that use of the common birth control pill may increase a woman's chances of developing breast cancer, especially in families with a history of the disease. To which pill users ought to have responded: Thanks for telling us now.
Such studies have long been highlighted by pro-lifers in recent years and then quickly dismissed as anti-choice propaganda. How the latest news about the pill will be handled is still a work in progress. But one would think the news would warrant at least a mention in the “New and Noteworthy” section of Planned Parenthood's state-of-the-art website. Nope. Not a word.
Which brings us back to the question of the latest pill, RU-486. Pro-lifers consistently mention, rote-like, the proven health concerns about the abortion pill — that is, once you've put aside for the moment the one fatality the pill promises.
But the “anti-choice”ers are just about the only ones talking about it these days. As some have noted, not only are the side effects downplayed, but the Danco website doesn't even mention the word “abortion.” RU-486 is the “early option pill.” As American Life League president Judie Brown has noted: “Danco omits the fact that the mother may be witnessing the passage of arms, legs, hands, feet and pieces of the spinal column. To the average teen who browses Danco's website, RU-486 looks like a pill that simply ends an unplanned pregnancy — not one that takes a human life.”
One wonders why they don't want to use the A-word. After all, it's not as if the reproductive-rights crowd has ever been forthright about the health dangers a woman faces when undergoing a surgical abortion. In 1989, for instance, the U.S. taxpayer-funded Abortion Surveillance Unit of the Centers for Disease Control reported only 12 deaths at the hands of abortionists. Investigative reporters and pro-life researchers have long-since debunked such lies. But you won't find any such admissions or confessions when you visit Planned Parenthood's webzine for teens, bright and cheerful as it is.
So, you do have to wonder about the accuracy of the preferred term, “pro-choice.” Does one actually have options when she has little or no idea what she is getting into? When she doesn't know what a pill is or what it will do to the developing baby inside her or what it will do to her?
So much for choice.
