Reversing the Abortion Pill: Giving Women and Their Babies a Second Chance
A young woman ten weeks pregnant walks into her local Planned Parenthood office, grieving the death of her father. She thinks she just can't cope with a pregnancy right now. Planned Parenthood gives her the abortion pill RU-486. She takes it and leaves the office, but hours later, she regrets her decision.
What does she do?
As we all know, there's a growing body of literature documenting the emotional devastation, depression, and guilt many woman suffer after having an abortion. Some, like this woman in Arizona, start having regrets during the several days it can take for the abortion pill procedure to complete its course.
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In this case, the woman goes back to Planned Parenthood the next morning looking for help. But she's told that the abortion pill cannot be reversed, and she could face complications if she doesn't finish off the series of pills.
Well, right there in the waiting room she Googles "abortion pill reversal" on her cell phone, and reaches a national call center that links women in the midst of this kind of abortion with physicians willing to help save the lives of their unborn babies.
Within 45 minutes, she is in the office of Dr. Allan Sawyer, an Arizona OB-GYN. He shows her an ultrasound of her two-and-a-half-month-old unborn baby, which has a heartbeat and is moving around in her womb. He says it might be possible to save the child and prescribes the hormone progesterone to reverse the effects of RU-486. Now safely through the first trimester, this grateful woman's baby is due in September.
According to the pro-life Center for Arizona Policy, this is no fluke. Although the Abortion Pill Reversal protocol is pretty new, already, 80 children have been born because of it, and more than 60 pregnancies, like this woman's, are ongoing due to this procedure.
Dr. Sawyer cannot be written off as a fly-by-night character, either. He is the former president of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and he has delivered more than 10,000 babies on three continents. In testimony before a state legislative committee, he said the abortion pill works by attacking progesterone in the pregnant woman, which kills the baby in utero. This effect can be reversed if progesterone is given to her quickly.
In early April, Arizona Governor Ducey signed into law a requirement that physicians must inform women who take the abortion pill that the pill's effects may be reversible.
Who could be against that? Only those who say it infringes on a woman's "right to choose." Except that they don't seem so eager to guarantee the right of a woman to choose to have her baby.
Now, one lawmaker who opposed the bill said administering high doses of progesterone to block the abortion pill's effects has not been studied and is an unproven medical procedure. In his testimony, however, Sawyer dealt with that objection, saying, "The safety of progesterone supplementation during pregnancy has been well established, and this is used routinely for high risk pregnancies such as those conceived through in vitro fertilization and also for pregnancies at risk of preterm labor."
Thank goodness that we still have doctors like Allan Sawyer, and legislators willing to vote their consciences as well as common sense in support of the dignity of human life. Women deserve all the facts. Especially when it might save a life.
Come to BreakPoint.org, click on this commentary, and we'll link you to more information on reversing the abortion pill.
