And now it seems that you can get an abortion over the Internet.
Abortion Pill
Years ago, I was in the middle of the effort to get “the abortion pill,” otherwise known as RU-486, approved for usage in the United States. On several occasions, I was at the table with the investors who had put up a lot of money to get the product approved by the FDA, the pro-choice groups that desperately lobbied for it and the company that would ultimately distribute it. The company was especially conscious about security, to the point where they had an office in Manhattan but no signs anywhere announcing its presence. Ultimately, after years of struggle, we prevailed.
From the beginning, advocates of the pill championed it as another option for women who did not necessarily want to have surgery. They also, however, got a bit hyperbolic about its impact when they predicted that the pill would “revolutionize” women’s reproductive health. Their thought was that additional physicians would come out of the woodwork and start prescribing this pill and that it would allow women to have abortions in the privacy of their own home. The abortion providers, on the other hand, voiced concern that the product was being built up too much and warned that a doctor who had never been involved in the delivery of abortion services before would not suddenly start prescribing the abortion pill. Today, the pill is being used by about 20% of women having abortions and we have not seen those doctors coming out of the woodwork, although some current abortion providers – particularly Planned Parenthood – have set up small offices where they only disperse the pill.
Abortion Pill
The bottom line is that the pill is a good option, but it is not for everyone.
And now, the pill is available on the Internet. Yep, the other day I ran across a website named http://www.abortionpillonline.com and, honestly, my first reaction was rather negative. First of all, the website itself looks very cheesy, very amateurish. Unlike the website of your average abortion provider, there was no hard information, like where they were located, what doctors were involved, etc. I didn’t
Abortion Pill
see any phone numbers. Heck, I didn’t even know what country this business was in until I emailed them and they told me that the product was made in India and distributed from India.
Now, I don’t know all the legalities here and I certainly am not accusing this group of being less than reputable. But this just sounds too easy for me. When it comes to any kind of medical care, everyone needs to be careful. Let’s face it, no matter what the medical specialty, there’s always someone out there who is eager to cut corners and make the quick buck. In the case of the abortion pill (which is actually two pills), there’s a lot more to it that just swallowing a pill. For example, this website just distributes the pill, it does not offer any counseling which, for some women, is very important. And it’s hard to predict how a woman will react once she starts the regimen, physically or emotionally. What if there’s an issue in the middle of the night? Who will she call? There are so many potential issues that might require the advice of a real, accessible doctor or at least a nurse.
I’m glad that women have more access to abortion services via the pill. Going to the Internet and just ordering a bunch of pills and swallowing them belies the seriousness of the abortion process. It makes me nervous.
Related articles
- How about an abortion clinic rating system? | Jill Stanek (amhec.wordpress.com)
- What Is the Abortion Pill? Get The Facts (oleole.com)
- Editorial: How Morning-After Pills Really Work (nytimes.com)
Abortion - Abortion Clinics, Abortion Pill, Abortion Information 
August 5, 2012 at 3:32 pm
If I were on your side, Pat, I’d have to say excellent again.
I call it the poison pill. It poisons the baby fatally, of course. And how can it not poison the woman – a chemical that interferes with the natural function of her body? It poisons the environment as well.
I know a better “birth control” pill, cyanide given to predatory males.
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August 6, 2012 at 7:05 am
Predatory males? Like you?
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August 6, 2012 at 7:59 am
Hey, wait a minute! I don’t believe in involving women in my masturbatory habits and then paying to kill someone who might result!
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August 6, 2012 at 8:12 am
I dont get the “predatory males” comment. If two people engage in consensual sex, is the male being “predatory?”
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August 6, 2012 at 9:17 am
Long story, Pat. Briefly, the male says, I need it, and the woman goes along with him.
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August 6, 2012 at 11:31 am
50’s Catholic marriage, what else? For the woman, sex stops being fun after the first pregnancy…..
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August 6, 2012 at 12:17 pm
Can’t stop exposing yourself, can you Chuck.
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August 6, 2012 at 8:10 am
How does the abortion pill “poison the environment,” John?
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August 6, 2012 at 9:16 am
It gets into the water supply and does strange things to the aquatic life. We’re not sure yet of what it’s doing to us
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August 6, 2012 at 11:37 am
John,
You sound like a good candidate for your predatory male pill.
Should Scott Roeder get the Cyanide Pill? he is a convicted murderer . . .
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August 6, 2012 at 12:16 pm
Jon, eh? So you decided to say something. Shouldn’t have.
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August 6, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Can you answer the question?
Or are you a slippery, creepy, protestor that has no education?
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August 6, 2012 at 1:25 pm
Can you ask decent question?
Or are you a slippery creepy, anti-lifer who has no education.
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August 7, 2012 at 11:56 am
I do have an education. Since you cannot create a literate response I am skeptical that you do though.
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August 7, 2012 at 1:51 pm
Bet you majored in “Women’s Studies,” or, perhaps, anthropology?
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August 7, 2012 at 10:27 pm
Instead of answering the question, just another dumb reply. Figures. No wonder this guy wastes his life accomplishing nothing.
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August 8, 2012 at 8:19 am
I live to annoy guys like you, Jon.
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August 13, 2012 at 4:17 am
That’s sad John, your life is dedicated to annoying others.
You could do so much with your life dedicated to helping children in your area that aren’t doing well in school, but you squander the life god gave you to Annoy people?
What a waste of life you are.
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August 13, 2012 at 10:06 am
Jon, he’s doing the best he can…..
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August 14, 2012 at 8:47 am
Shut up, Chuck. Jon — “That’s sad John, your life is dedicated to annoying others.”
I don’t classify you an an “other,” Jon. I classify you as one of the killers’ helpers who are insuring that a million plus others every year are tortured to death. I don’t want y’all to escape censure, or, as you put it, annoyance. It’s the least I can do.
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August 5, 2012 at 5:18 pm
Pat,
Thanks for this important and timely post. The FDA provides some guidelines for Internet web sites that sell drugs
***Signs of a trustworthy website
It’s located in the United States.
It’s licensed by the state board of pharmacy where the website is operating. A list of these boards is available at the website of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy.
It has a licensed pharmacist available to answer your questions.
It requires a prescription for prescription medicines from your doctor or another health care professional who is licensed to prescribe medicines.
It provides contact information and allows you to talk to a person if you have problems or questions.
Another way to check on a website is to look for the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy’s (NABP) Verified Internet Pharmacy Practice Sites™ Seal, also known as the VIPPS® Seal.
This seal means that the Internet pharmacy is safe to use because it has met state licensure requirements, as well as other NABP criteria. Visit the VIPPS website to find legitimate pharmacies that carry the VIPPS® seal.
***Signs of an unsafe website
It sends you drugs with unknown quality or origin.
It gives you the wrong drug or another dangerous product for your illness.
It doesn’t provide a way to contact the website by phone.
It offers prices that are dramatically lower than the competition.
It may offer to sell prescription drugs without a prescription—this is against the law!
It may not protect your personal information.
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August 6, 2012 at 8:14 am
This is interesting, Kate. I have been in touch with a represenative from the company via email and she assures me they are “legitimate.” She then goes on to say that they have been approved by some health agency in India, etc., etc. But I wonder what the standards are in India? And, again, I’d be concerned that a woman would take the pills, start to expel the fetus in the middle of the night and maybe freak out. Who would she call if she hadn’t been to a doctor already?
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August 6, 2012 at 8:37 am
Pat,
I totally support having more autonomy over our individual health care. But for the average person, diagnosing and medicating yourself with unknown pharmaceuticals is seems downright dangerous if not suicidal.
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August 6, 2012 at 10:18 am
A vast array of pharmaceuticals – including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones – have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, according to an Associated Press investigation.
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August 7, 2012 at 6:01 am
In the Washington Post today, an article about gunman, Wade Michael Page,
who opened fire in Wisconsin Sikh temple,
who repeatedly exhorted members to act more decisively to support their cause
who encouraged people to stop hiding behind the computer or making excuses
*****Patterns Connect****
A WaPo article could very well read . . .
In Washington Post today, an article about gunman, John Dunkle,
who opened fire in a New Jersey abortion clinic,
who repeatedly exhorted members to act more decisively to support their cause with his blog comments such as:
“I believe we should use every legitimate means, including force, in our attempt to protect those being tortured to death”
or
“We are not advocating violence; we advocate stopping the violence. It’s open season on babies seven days a week. Why don’t we have one day, call it Wacky Wednesday, when we kill four thousand abortionists. Baby murder would grind to a halt. Experts agree, “Dead Doctors Don’t Kill Children.”
How different is Page from Dunkle, really?
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August 7, 2012 at 8:16 am
Quite a bit different, Observer.
Most so-called “pro-lifers” are prudent, because they aren’t overwhelmed by their need to be a hero.
As Ernest Becker points out in his book, “Denial of Death,” every human being is aware of his unavoidable death and has the imagination to envision it. Because it is the most fearsome thing we can imagine, says Becker, we would be paralyzed if we did not have some way to remove it from the forefront of our consciousness.
So, we develop a strategy that works for us, he says. Many of us find strength in a religion which promises us eternal life (if we qualify), in a philosophy which offers an intellectual equivalent, or we simply repress it. While the first two operator quite well, the third one requires a lot of psychological energy– it is work to keep something repressed: when we let up, it leaks out to do damage, as with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
So-called “pro-lifers” at bottom are people who have repressed their fear of death. Although very religious in the main, they actually do not have the deep faith that sustains their non-“pro-life” brethren; they need temporal and immediate proof that they will gain triumph over death.
Becker says one temporal proof of trumph over death is to become a hero– to pay the price society specifies and then live on– Joan of Arc, Horatius, Achilles, etc.
So the so-called “pro-lifer” seeks to make himself a hero by declaring a humanoid life form– the fetus– is fully human and that he is its rescuer. His mission is to sell the public on his public relations scheme, rather than to actually assist proper fetal development, much less the nurture of the subsequent child.
So, it would make sense for him to kill any- and everybody associated with abortion, EXCEPT that in all but a few cases (Scott Roeder, etc.), he is aware that to do so will add even more stress to his already-overburdened psychological processes.
So, like Mr. Dunkle, he openly admires his colleagues who choose the psychopathic and maintains that he would be just like them were it not that he is a coward. Actually, he’s not; he’s just sane enough to be prudent.
The proper response to the whole dysfunctional self-help movement is to raise their taxes to fund the proper nurture ($260,000 to get them through high school) of every child whose parents say they really weren’t ready to have another. That would be about a million a year, plus of course all those children resulting from pregnancies “rescued” on the sidewalk in front of an abortion service. I think $40,000 per “pro-lifer” household would just about do it.
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August 7, 2012 at 11:22 am
I keep telling this guy that I would try to protect, in my weak ineffective way, all humanoid life forms if they were in danger of being tortured to death, and especially, now that I’ve kind of gotten to know him, the one named Chuckles.
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August 7, 2012 at 12:00 pm
How did you protect the innocent’s murdered by the Anti Abortion Christian Terrorist Murderers that you admire John Dunkle?
I’ve read you demean innocent women right here on this site for no reason.
You are just a cruel person in my opinion.
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August 7, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Jon,
He doesn’t protect anyone just his own sorry self.
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August 7, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Kate’s right, Jon, but don’t ask her to correct your garbled post.
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August 7, 2012 at 2:43 pm
Nope, we let you amuse yourself with volunteer position of chief editor and PIA
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August 7, 2012 at 3:11 pm
That’s true, but common, you know you’re learning stuff.
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August 7, 2012 at 5:49 pm
Right. I do learn more and more every single day about what you write. Not sure of the value, however.
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August 8, 2012 at 8:21 am
You’ll realize the value later.
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August 7, 2012 at 1:30 pm
The question is: why do self-proclaimed “pro-lifers” limit their attention to humanoid life forms when to fail to nurture them beyond that stage is to abandon them to the absolutely worst forms of predation and victimization?
Until they prove otherwise, the answer is that they don’t care for human life; they only care about the concept in a way that meets their needs, not the needs of the fetus or the subsequent child.
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August 8, 2012 at 8:24 am
Chuck himself abandons humanoid life forms after their first birthdays when the worst forms of predation and victimization are far more apparent.
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August 9, 2012 at 10:00 am
Babies are made from fetuses. If there is no one who will say, “this is my baby,” the fetus doesn’t stand a chance of becoming human. After its birth, the state might grant it humanity (in Japan, births are not recorded for a full month afterward, which gives you an idea of how personhood can be treated differently; doing so lowers the infant mortality rate, which makes for better public health statistics).
So-called “pro-lifers” do not “rescue” anything other than their fragile psyches, and they do so at the expense of women, children and families.
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August 9, 2012 at 11:10 am
Isn’t Chuck amazing! I’d heard they kill infants over there even though the stats don’t show it. Now I learn this!
Other than that, though, I don’t what the heck he’s talking about, as usual.
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August 7, 2012 at 8:07 am
At first glance, Kate, this is libel — never even heard before that second quote you attribute to me. I’ll let you know more after another few glances.
Also: “We are not . . . ‘Dead Doctors Don’t Kill Children.'”
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August 7, 2012 at 8:14 am
Read your own blog—you posted these comments even though they are attributed to Scott. They are your responsibility.
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August 7, 2012 at 11:10 am
See “his blog comments.” That’s where you’d have to pay dearly. Be careful.
But my fault, too! How could I not even remember Scott’s fabulous statement! Getting old. Shut up.
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August 7, 2012 at 12:02 pm
What kind of threat is that John?
It is scary when you say things that sound threatening since you admire convicted anti abortion Christian Murderers it is intimidating from someone like that might have a screw loose in my opinion.
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August 7, 2012 at 2:10 pm
Jon, will you stop saying “in my opinion”? We all know it’s your opinion. Ain’t mine, for sure.
Now, to get to what you asked about a threat. I guess you’re referring to “Shut up.” I wasn’t threatening Kate, I was telling her to ignore my “Getting old” comment. I know what she is capable of doing with that.
If, on the other hand, you meant it’s “Be careful” that sounds threatening, you might be right. I bet I could take money from Kate in a libel suite. She of course would have to argue that she was not saying I wrote the Wacky Wednesday paragraph, but I think she’d lose.
Gotta be careful about what you say around here. Lookit me!
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August 7, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Oh, goodie. Another pathetic prolifer filing another frivolous lawsuit. You’re going to take money from me for what?
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August 7, 2012 at 3:14 pm
I’m saying I probably could, but I’d rather leave it “you owe me.”
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August 7, 2012 at 3:26 pm
Owe you what?
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August 7, 2012 at 3:41 pm
a favor
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August 7, 2012 at 5:46 pm
FAT CHANCE
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August 7, 2012 at 6:04 pm
hahahahaha
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August 7, 2012 at 1:47 pm
Ouch!
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August 7, 2012 at 2:11 pm
See?
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August 7, 2012 at 5:47 pm
See?
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August 7, 2012 at 8:19 am
Here’s another from John Dunkle’s blog
Scott Roeder —— God’s man ——— My Hero
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August 7, 2012 at 11:12 am
Shame, don’t remember that one either. Wish I’d said it.
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August 7, 2012 at 12:03 pm
Who wrote it on your Blog John?
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August 7, 2012 at 2:12 pm
Look it up for me, Jon, I’m kind of curious.
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August 7, 2012 at 1:46 pm
Wow! From Internet abortions to comparisons of Paige to Dunkle (or should it have been Dunkle to Paige?). And then Dunkle threatens a poster? How novel.
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August 7, 2012 at 4:53 pm
I would not call you “a poster,” Kate. I would call you a naturally brilliant woman who has almost overcome the horrible education she’s received, and is probably dishing out. Almost, but not quite, and I’m her only hope.
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August 7, 2012 at 5:46 pm
Call me dense, but I don’t know what you mean by ‘dishing out’ or ‘I’m her only hope’
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August 7, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Dishing out means “teaching.”
I’m her only hope means I’m the only one telling her the truth. Well, I and my friends.
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August 8, 2012 at 11:11 am
Oh, is that what you do outside the clinic, dishing out?
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August 8, 2012 at 4:08 pm
yup
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August 8, 2012 at 9:48 am
In testimony from the prolifers, testimony that was at once absurd and laughable, the anti claimed she needed to be close to the women as they entered the door. Without that closeness, the Holy Spirit (HS) wouldn’t reach the women.
Now, take a moment and reflect on the absurdity of this notion. Did she believe she was the bearer of the HS? Did she believe the HS was only available to those who stood in close proximity? Well, there must be something to these anti abortion folks that re-orbits their thinking. In a post on RH RealityCheck, there’s an article about a women who threatened an abortion doctor because “God told me to threaten her”
Weird?
Google RH Reality & Got told me to threaten her
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August 13, 2012 at 4:20 am
Religous nuts and their magic is so creepy.
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August 14, 2012 at 8:52 am
I’d say “are,” but I guess you could get away with saying “is.”
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