Source: Washington Post; October 15,
2000
RU 486: A Psychological Nightmare for Women
Washington, DC -- When Rachel heard that RU-486 had been approved, she
dropped the laundry basket and ran downstairs to turn on the TV. As the
newscaster announced the "breakthrough," Rachel was thinking:
"If I hadn't
taken it, right now I'd have a newborn in the house; which room would he
or she sleep in?"
Those broadcasts Rachel saw last month described the Food and Drug
Administration's approval of the dangerous abortion drug RU 486. Its
very
nickname -- "the abortion pill" -- supposedly implies
convenience and
ease, liberation from the hassles and stigma of surgical abortions.
However, as Rachel and other women who've taken the dangerous abortion
pill can vouch, there's little that's easy about RU-486. American women
who've used the drug describe as it as less convenient and more messy,
and
sometimes more painful, than surgical abortion, according to those who
have conducted trials on 9,000 women so far.
Yet many chose it not despite those obstacles, but because of them. The
pain factor made it seem more "natural," some abortion
practitioners
claim. Taking the abortion drug at home gave them a greater sense of
control. And some even said the control and suffering served as a way to
confront their own moral dilemmas.
"When I'm doing the initial counseling and a woman says she really
wants
[the pregnancy] over with quickly or if she has a very busy schedule,
she
will generally not end up using [RU-486]," said Kathy Rogers, a
researcher
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, one of 18 sites for the latest
clinical trials. "Because it's not just a pill; it's a process. And
it's
not going to be easy or fast or simple."
In demographic terms Rachel -- who agreed to be interviewed if her name
were not disclosed -- is not the prototype RU-486 user. She is six years
older than the average age of 28, and is married, with two children. But
judging from interviews and published studies, her reactions are quite
typical.
She absorbed her nurse's warning that taking RU 486 would be "more
painful, with all the bleeding and cramping." Still, she chose it
because
"it gave me a sense of control. Because it's something that I
choose to
do, rather than something that's done to me."
By that she means common medical concerns about invasive surgery, and
the physical trauma to the body. But she also means something more personal,
more emotional--a feeling the pill's advocates don't like to talk about
but which nonetheless seems common to the women who take RU 486.
It served for her as a form of penance, a way of grappling with her
ambivalence over any kind of abortion and killing her unborn child.
"It was like, if I'm going to do this I have to take the
responsibility
and do it myself, and I have to put myself through something hard,"
she
said. "It would have been cowardly to have someone fix it for me in
some
easy, safe way. It would not have felt right.
"You know, I still think about it almost every day," she
continued. "I
will always wonder what this baby would have been like. I still don't
think I did the wrong thing, but I wish the whole thing had never come
up."
As post-abortion experts point out, the stigma and pain of the of
abortion
is kept alive whether the abortion is surgical or chemical in nature.
However, abortion advocates refuse to call it guilt. "That's a red
flag
for us, if a woman is overwhelmed by guilt," Rogers said.
"The logic is, even if takes longer, even if it hurts more, there's
a
sense of doing it yourself, rather than being done unto," said
Carolyn Westhof, who conducted the trials at the Columbia Medical School in New
York. "Often it's not really a medical decision, but a
psychological one."
Yet much about Rachel's experience suggests that RU-486 may not change
the
abortion climate in America quite as much as expected. Not at the
political level, between abortion advocates and pro-life advocates, and
especially not at the personal level, where a woman confronts her
neighbors, her family and her conscience by virtue of what she's done.
When Rachel found out she was pregnant just before New Year's Day 2000
she
decided to have an abortion.
"When I discovered it I thought, 'Oh my God I can't do this,'
" she
recalled. "My second child turned out much more demanding; I scream
at her
almost every day. And I thought, what's the next step? I'll start
hitting
somebody. I was really concerned I might become an abusive mother."
She stayed up until 3 a.m. talking it over with her husband, and by the
end of the second day they'd made up their minds.
The next morning she immediately called her obstetrician, who had seen
her
through two pregnancies. This is the stage were pro-life advocates can
hold out hope; namely, that doctors will refuse to hand out RU 486
because
they are unwilling to perform surgical abortions when RU 486 fails to
kill
the unborn child because it is taken too late into the pregnancy.
Here Rachel encountered frustration because her doctor refused to hand
out
RU 486 or perform an abortion.
Rachel looked up Planned Parenthood in the phone book. She called, and
the
counselor on the phone pointedly affirmed her decision to have an
abortion. Once she determined that Rachel was in the first weeks of
pregnancy, she directed Rachel to a local facility conducting RU 486
trials.
She made an appointment for the first day she could, the Tuesday after
New
Year's. There she listened to an explanation of the differences between
a
surgical and chemical abortion -- an apparently was given no
encouragement
to choose abortion alternatives.
She first sifted through her emotional state. "Finding out I was
pregnant
and not wanting it made me feel I was losing control of my life. All New
Year's I kept thinking of the same sentence: 'Stop the train, I want to
get off.' "
RU-486 seemed the way to "regain that control," she said.
"I thought about
the differences; about going into a room in a paper gown and having
someone do something to me with instruments. Ugh. As opposed to keeping
my
clothes on and taking the pill myself. Me doing it, to myself."
From the counselor's descriptions, Rachel concluded RU-486 "was
just like
having a miscarriage. It might be painful, I might bleed," she
thought,
"but it will be more natural; my body will be doing it to
itself." And
then her final thought before she gave her answer: "I thought the
least I
could do was suffer a little."
She took the first of two drugs at Planned parenthood that day and
"felt a
huge weight lifted off my shoulders. I could literally feel it. It was
the
first time I understood what that phrase meant."
But no moment since has been quite so weightless. What happened to
Rachel
afterwards was nothing short of a horrific nightmare.
She still hasn't told anyone except her husband about what she did. Not
her best friends, not her two children, certainly not her mother who,
like
Rachel herself, "would spend the rest of her life wondering what
this
child would have been like."
Her heart still jumps every time she passes the house next door, the
house
of a man "who is very religious and I don't want to think about
what he
would do if he knew I'd had what I'm sure he considers just plain old
abortion."
She considered going public until she scanned the Internet the day the
news broke and read the reactions of abortion opponents: "They talk
like
we make this decision so cavalierly. Yeah, right. Like they need to make
us feel guilt. Like there isn't plenty of that already."
And she still remembers most vividly the last moment of the whole
ordeal;
when she woke up for the millionth time and went to the bathroom the
morning after taking the second part of the dangerous abortion drug,
feeling crampy and achy. She
looked down and saw the unborn baby.
She looked at the baby for a long time because the baby was bigger than
she expected. She stared for what seemed like an hour--frozen, tired.
"It seemed rude to flush it," she thought to herself. "I
should be having
a burial or something." But then she heard her daughter awaken and
thought: "Well, you have to get on with your day."
--
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