Mifepristone is a step in the right direction
Trust me, you don’t know what I mean yet
By Carl Staab

	I suppose that mifepristone, the drug commonly referred to as RU-486 (it sounds more like a computer chip to me), is better than later-term abortions.  That’s about all that I can say for it, though.  I agreed (for once) with George W. Bush when he said that he wouldn’t try to block the distribution of the RU-486 pill.  We have problems that need to be dealt with at more basic levels.
	Safety (for the mother at least) isn’t really a huge issue.  “It works about 95% of the time.  It is most effective in the first 7 weeks of pregnancy.  After 9 weeks, it is less effective and the side effects are more severe.  Bleeding can last up to 9 days (compared with about 5 days for a surgical abortion).  Approximately 1% of women will have heavy bleeding which requires additional treatment.  The medication totally fails to cause an abortion in about 1% of the women; about 2 to 3% of women experience an incomplete abortion.  They require a follow-up surgical abortion.  About 0.1 to 0.2% of the women experience excessive bleeding and require a blood transfusion…  It is not a simple procedure; it has unpleasant side effects.”  In terms of risk of death, taking RU-486 within its approved time limit (seven weeks) is actually safer than childbirth.
	The basic question that defines most of the abortion controversy is, when does an embryo/fetus/baby become human?  Pro-choicers say it’s a part of its mother’s body until born.  Pro-lifers say it’s human from the moment of conception.  These are generalized stereotypes, but still fairly accurate.
Babies can be born months early and survive.  They require medical care, of course, but so do many babies born on time or late.  The simple fact that a baby (or a fetus, whatever), is still attached to its mother is irrelevant to me.  If it were outside the womb, killing it would be murder (or, at least, most people think so, thankfully); why not when it’s inside?  At some point, the mother is simply a life-support system.
On the other hand, saying that “you can’t kill it because it could become a productive citizen” seems ridiculous.  I could argue that not having as much sex as possible is preventing more gametes from becoming productive citizens, but I won’t.
Where’s the dividing line?  It’s hard to find, and certainly fuzzy.  In the end, though, choosing between a baby’s right to live and a woman’s right not to have a baby if she so chooses, I’d rather err on the safe side.  RU-486 is a step in the right direction: that is, earlier.  Contraceptives or birth-control pills would be much better.  Maybe, someday, people will decide not to have the baby before making it.  Wouldn’t that be something?  I doubt it’ll happen, though; right now it seems more likely that abortion will eventually breed itself out of the human race.

Just think… how would women feel if men could abort themselves from a relationship?  The argument for abortion is usually that if it’s a part of a woman’s body, she should be able to do what she wants with it.  If anything, since a fetus cannot possibly be argued to be part of a man’s body, the father should have less responsibility to stay in a relationship than the mother.  The argument goes that a woman can control it because it’s a part of her body; it isn’t a part of a man’s body, so why should he even have to deal with it?  The father should have at least the same rights as the mother to absolve responsibility from his parenthood.  I argue that neither of them should have that right, but it seems that pro-choice supporters want one without the other, to have their cake and eat it too.
	I don’t get involved on the issues of personal rights.  I don’t think it should be illegal to kill yourself.  I would say it’s wrong, and there should be ways to get counseling, but the important thing for government is that it doesn’t hurt anyone else.  In abortion, though, even diehard pro-choicers have to admit that there is at least some chance that a fetus has a right to live.  Neither side can prove its point (or, alternately, both sides can “prove” their points), so each side has to admit that there’s some merit to the other argument (although they probably won’t).  This isn’t about doing something to yourself, though.  Choosing between a fetus’s possible right to live and a mother’s possible right to shirk responsibility is pretty easy to me, and I hope that other people will see it the same way.

*Note that I am willing to compromise on the issue of babies born from rape, mostly to expedite doing something good.  I could see how women could get easy medical writeoffs if they were allowed to abort for medical reasons, so I’m not so sure about that one, but if somebody comes up with a good way to enforce a law allowing that, I probably wouldn’t oppose it.