RU-486: Baby Poison that Also Kills Women

RU-486: BABY POISON THAT ALSO KILLS WOMEN -- (House of Representatives - March 10, 2005)

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under a previous order of the House, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 minutes.

Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, RU-486 is baby poison, and now we know it is also fatal to women. RU-486 is a powerful pesticide that was developed to kill human beings, not cure them. It targets unborn children for elimination as if they were cancers or viruses and hurts the women who take it. The fact that pro-abortion groups led the charge to water down the FDA's safety measures on RU-486 and now have been silent in the death of Holly Patterson is an indictment against them. They care more about abortion than they do women. These groups have actually chosen to subjugate women's lives and health to the insatiable desire for legal abortion at any time and for any reason. They have chosen abortion over women, but our current FDA should not continue to side with these extreme organizations such as Planned Parenthood. The FDA should be concerned more about health than they are with the bottom line of what the abortion industry is making.

That is why I so strongly support Holly's Law, a bill authored by the Senator from South Carolina (Mr. DeMint) and the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett). I was very glad to join the gentleman from Maryland today at a press conference promoting this important legislation. As a father, my heart goes out to the Pattersons in their grief over the loss of their daughter. RU-486 killed Holly Patterson, and the approval of this terrible drug during the Clinton administration was done in the name of political expediency instead of patient health.

Let me just say briefly, Mr. Speaker, that the FDA violated Federal law and their own standards in approving RU-486. They approved it without the submission of data from adequate and well-controlled clinical trials. They created a final approval regimen for the use of RU-486 that does not reflect safeguards employed in the clinical trials on which FDA relied. They approved RU-486 using the expedited subpart H process which is only supposed to be used to approve drugs to treat serious or life-threatening illnesses. Unless you construe the killing of an unborn child, boy or girl, to be a disease or an illness, subpart H should have never been used.

In violation of their own pediatric rule, they never tested the drug on adolescents, even though it is being used by adolescents. They have failed to impose and enforce restrictions on the use of RU-486 commensurate with the risk that it poses to women, and women are dying. They failed to require the Population Council to honor in full its postapproval safety study commitments, and let us not forget that this drug is being manufactured in the People's Republic of China.

It is important to keep in mind that with RU-486, we are talking about calibrating a poison designed to kill one person without causing harm or without killing another. The purpose of RU-486 is to chemically poison, this is the purpose of it, another human being. That it is dangerous physically and mentally and should never be sold to young people as a solution to their problems ought to be self-evident. Abortion, Mr. Speaker, is violence against children. We can do better for women. It is not in their interest that their children be killed with these powerful poisons.

I would just say finally, Mr. Speaker, that the longer this poison is on the market, administered to young people by groups like Planned Parenthood, the more unborn boys and girls and women who take it will be at risk of death and injury.

Let us not forget, as well, that Planned Parenthood is an organization that annually performs about 240,000 abortions. They make an enormous amount of money from the abortions that they provide, either surgically or chemically; and this is now another tool in their arsenal against unborn children. They ought to be known as Child Abuse, Incorporated for the large number of children that they have killed and continue to kill with U.S. subsidies both at the Federal and the State level.

Mr. Speaker, again we call on the FDA. It is time to take this drug, this chemical poisoning of unborn children that is so dangerous to women, off the market.

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