Planned Parenthood's Latest Victim

Last month, in "Planned Parenthood Tells You How to Abort Your Baby—No Prescription Necessary", I described how Margaret Sanger's organization is telling women to go to the Web site of the radical group Women on Waves so they can learn how to use the abortion pill at home. Now, a New Zealand woman has done just that, ordering the pill online—and she nearly died of a hemorrhage.

To be accurate, while the New Zealand woman is reported to have ordered mifepristone over the Internet, the Planned Parenthood-endorsed Women on Waves site teaches how to use a different drug, misoprostol. But as Planned Parenthood helpfully explains on its Web site, mifepristone needs to be administered in conjunction with misoprostol in order for it to work, so it's possible that the women in fact took both drugs.

At any rate, Planned Parenthood touts mifepristone as "safe" and pushes it to teenage girls on its Teenwire site—even giving them an 800 number to call for information, and telling them how to get around parental-consent laws with a "judicial bypass."

Planned Parenthood tells women how to give themselves abortions at home because, the organization claims, it is the only way to "protect" them from having to get illegal abortions. The argument is cruelly misogynistic, because it implies—falsely—that a woman giving herself a dangerous pill at home is "safer" than one who undergoes a dangerous procedure in a hospital. And both women, under this assumption, are safer than one who undergoes childbirth. (To those who would point to the dangers of childbirth in Third World countries, the obvious answer is, is it any safer for a woman who's hemorrhaging from an abortion pill to seek medical care in such locales?)

But Planned Parenthood's greater-good argument for its touting at-home abortions is completely moot in the case of the New Zealand woman who almost died. That woman had options. If she was smart enough to know how to buy an abortion pill online, she must have known that New Zealand clinics would have given her a legal abortion.

Planned Parenthood bears some if not all of the guilt for the woman's harrowing experience, because, along with sister-organization the International Planned Parenthood Federation, it continues to promote mifepristone, actively fighting attempts to ban its use. The deaths of mifepristone users, and the FDA's recent black-box warning on the drug, have only steeled the organization's resolve.

Planned Parenthood never pretended to care about unborn children. Now it's proving for all to see that it doesn't care about women either. But it sure cares for that quarter-billion or so that it gets each year in taxpayer funds.
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