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ru-486 now 'just another drug' (kinda)
but the insanity hasn't ended. all manner of political websites and weblogs are being entertained by amateur commentators.Australia ends ban on 'abortion drug' RU-486
Thursday, February 16, 2006
David Shucosky at 12:10 PM ET
[JURIST] The Australian Parliament ended a de facto ban on the so-called "abortion drug" RU-486 (also known as Mifepristone) on Thursday by removing the need for approval by the Health Minister to use the drug. Tony Abbott, a strong anti-abortionist, had refused all applications for its use.
Last week, the Australian Senate voted 45-28 to end the approval requirement, and the measure cleared the House without a formal count. The Therapeutic Goods Association will now handle requests from doctors to prescribe the drug.
BBC News has more.
The Sydney Morning Herald has local coverage.
the 'debate' has been illuminating for the significant amount of smoke and mirrors in play. at least most politicians had a grasp of what they were actually voting on by the time the matter came to the final vote.
a positive sign, though lost under the hail of obfuscating misdirection.
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unfortunately, it seems that no company is prepared to go through the hassle of getting ru-486 approved anyway.
what gets lost in the palaver is that ru-486 is a cancer treatment. it's abortifacent effect is a sideline ...
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But I thought I read somewhere that there are now companies interested in selling the drug in Australia?
As for aborting ourselves out of existence - WTF? That's just insane. The human population has the opposite problem, if anything.
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many of the cancer drugs are nasty beasties. after all, they're intended to kill very tenacious organisms - which happen to be parts of ourselves.
the masses are emotional. thinking is a secondary activity. they remember how they felt much better than what they were thinking.
it was not surprising, but still disappoinitng, to see how quickly an issue about the proper authority to regulate a particular therapeutic drug became a screaming match over how people feel about deliberate miscarriage.
i'm hearing mixed signals about the place regarding ru-486 availability. until i hear more from my source in medicare australia, i'll just wait and see.
the 'aborting ourselves out of existence' was more a reflex of personal rage locally than the larger context. plenty of 'religious' people object to the killing of embryos and feotuses per se ... refusing to accept that neither are independent living things, and more particularly they're only interested in their own feelings on the matter. until very late in pregnancy, the putative child is not independant of the woman who carrying it. without her body, the developing body has no life.
having spent some time with a pregnant woman, and more time with biology, i have a pretty good outsider's understanding of the process. i also have a personal experience with parenting. no one should be forced to carry, give birth to, and then parent if they do not want to. but the nutters don't see things that way. they're fixated on 'every life is sacred' - by which they really mean 'we ought to control every life'.
if as much energy and effort was put into teaching kids about the value of their own lives and giving them the tools to manage themselves there might be a few more adults who were equipped for adulthood. some of them might even become adults, rather than reactive adolescents with drivers licences.
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I'm always amazed at how many right-to-lifers are pro the death penalty, and pro war. I find it an interesting example of double think - it is never OK to destroy a small bundle of unthinking cells (early in pregnancy) but it's fine to accept thinking, talking feeling children dying as "collateral damage" in a military action.
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requires thinking.