Choice at a price

Abortion isn't "safe and effective" for everyone

On September 17, 2003, Holly Marie Patterson died. Holly was a beautiful blonde California girl who had turned 18 just two weeks earlier. She had graduated from high school in 2002 after only three years and attended a Lutheran church in her home town of Livermore, a suburb of San Francisco.

By all outside appearances, everything was fine. But in reality, everything was not fine. Holly was seven weeks pregnant with an unplanned child, and she hid this secret from her family and most of her friends.

On September 10, she entered a Planned Parenthood facility with her boyfriend and left with a drug called misoprostol in the form of vaginal inserts after swallowing another drug called mifepristone. This cocktail of drugs is better known to the public as RU-486. Mifepristone, which is marketed under the more catchy name of Mifeprex, blocks a hormone called progesterone which is key to the continuation of a pregnancy and the life of an unborn child. Misoprostol, which was originally designed as an ulcer medication, causes the woman's body to expel the dead child's remains.

However, these drugs don't always work as planned and in some cases like Holly's, they can lead to critical injuries or death. Holly died from a systemic infection and septic shock when the abortion industry's favorite drugs didn't fully complete their job. Some of the remains of Holly's child stayed inside her, causing her to bleed extensively, feel immense physical pain and eventually killing her.

Monty Patterson, Holly's father, didn't know about his daughter's pregnancy or abortion until after she had been hospitalized. After her death, he said, "Every time I think about it, I think, ‘She suffered in silence,' she felt she would disappoint everyone around her, and then she had to carry that whole load. I wish she could have told me so I could have helped her."

When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved misoprostol to be used in abortions, it called for misoprostol to be orally administered by a physician during a second visit, two days after the first visit. In Holly's case, no second visit was planned and Planned Parenthood gave her vaginal inserts of misoprostol in her first visit to use on her own without the supervision of a physician. Many abortionists have begun to do away with the FDA's approved regimen of a second visit because it is an inconvenience and "studies have found it is safe and effective to allow women to self administer (misoprostol) at home."

Although Planned Parenthood and the rest of the abortion industry will still claim that an RU-486 abortion is "safe and effective," those who knew Holly will know better. Two other women in the United States have died after taking the abortion pill, and Canadian RU-486 drug trials were stopped after a participant died. Other known complications from these drugs include severe bleeding and cramping, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, back pain, dizziness and incomplete abortion.

Monty Patterson said, "The medical community treats this as a simple pill you take, as if you're getting rid of a headache. The procedure, the follow ups, it's all too lackadaisical. The girl gets a pill. Then she's sent home to do the rest on her own. There are just too many things that can go wrong."

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