RU-486 is a private tool of freedom
The day is near. Next spring, Canadian women will be able to get the RU-486 abortion pill prescribed for them. Women in France had this right 25 years ago. Americans had it in 2000, Italians in 2009. Health Canada has been stalling on approving the drug for years.
Waiting for RU-486 has been like waiting for winter to end. This would be especially true for women in P.E.I., which is too primitive to offer abortions at all, and New Brunswick, which has fought to block and humiliate women seeking abortions. Its new Liberal premier is still doing this.
But elsewhere, women are free, and with RU-486, freer than that. The drug is just as safe as a surgical abortion, but more importantly, for teenagers, frightened wives and girlfriends and those with punitive families, it is a more private way to make this most central and personal decision.
Justice Minister Peter MacKay flatly refused to comment, so horrified was he at Health Canada’s decision. Health Minister Rona Ambrose shuddered and denied responsibility. Saskatchewan MP David Anderson (Cypress Hills— Grasslands) was furious. “It is a dangerous combination of drugs that destroys a woman’s tissues in the womb in order to kill her preborn child.” Preborn indeed.
Gather ’round the flickering fire, children, and let me tell you of times when almost all men were MacKays and Andersons. Women couldn’t get hospital abortions without the permission of a committee of doctors, some of them horrible. On their own, women used home remedies, knitting needles and wire clothes hangers, anything to make it stop. They died, horribly.
Later, Dr. Henry Morgentaler went to jail rather than refuse abortions. Canadian women gained abortion rights in 1988, thanks to that good man.
Thus far, use of the drug, known as mifepristone (brand name: unpronounceable Mifegymiso), will only be permitted within the first seven weeks of a pregnancy. Many women won’t even know they’re pregnant at that point. Young teenagers almost certainly won’t. The time span for prescribing will have to be extended, and one expects a new non-Conservative government to help out.
As well, Mifegymiso should be available over the counter. As it stands, women will need to find a principled doctor and see him three times: once for three mifepristone tablets, again within 48 hours for misoprostol and then two weeks later for a post-treatment exam.
One wonders how a terrified 14year-old girl will find a good doctor in a small town rife with rumour. If she has to travel, how will she plausibly spend 2 1⁄ weeks away? She
2 won’t be able to make that third visit.
It has been suggested that some doctors will refuse to prescribe the drug. They are obligated to send you to a doctor who will. What you can then do is go to a site like Rate MDs.com. These are sites that rate doctors, anonymously and often unkindly — I find them unfair and do not like them — but they are a way to alert patients to sexually violent doctors who haven’t been policed by a lax provincial medical college.
You can alert other women that this doctor wouldn’t prescribe Mifegymiso. Most of his or her women patients will flee. Cruelty to women isn’t good for business.
I don’t want to shovel information at you without expressing my joy. The abortion pill is a private tool of freedom. It will save you from the kind of man women detest. He falls under the title “controlling” (hi, Stephen Harper) and until recently he ran the world.
Children, it’s important for you to know that every right you have now — and there are many you don’t have yet — has been hard-won. Did you know that in Quebec, women didn’t get the vote until 1940?
Until very recently, life was primitive. Children, did you know there was a time when conditioner had not been invented? You just washed your hair and . . . nothing. I don’t know what condoms were like, but I suspect people used waxed paper and rubber bands.
Children, the past was awful. The future is glorious. This October, vote Liberal, NDP or Green, for even more delicious female freedom.