[Congressional Record Volume 151, Number 28 (Thursday, March 10, 2005)]
[House]
[Pages H1332-H1333]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1545
               RU-486: BABY POISON THAT ALSO KILLS WOMEN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Dent). Under a previous order of the 
House, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. Mr. Speaker, RU-486 is baby poison, and now 
we know it is also fatal to women. RU-486 is a powerful pesticide that 
was developed to kill human beings, not cure them. It targets unborn 
children for elimination as if they were cancers or viruses and hurts 
the women who take it. The fact that pro-abortion groups led the charge 
to water down the FDA's safety measures on RU-486 and now have been 
silent in the death of Holly Patterson is an indictment against them. 
They care more about abortion than they do women. These groups have 
actually chosen to subjugate women's lives and health to the insatiable 
desire for legal abortion at any time and for any reason. They have 
chosen abortion over women, but our current FDA should not continue

[[Page H1333]]

to side with these extreme organizations such as Planned Parenthood. 
The FDA should be concerned more about health than they are with the 
bottom line of what the abortion industry is making.
  That is why I so strongly support Holly's Law, a bill authored by the 
Senator from South Carolina (Mr. DeMint) and the gentleman from 
Maryland (Mr. Bartlett). I was very glad to join the gentleman from 
Maryland today at a press conference promoting this important 
legislation. As a father, my heart goes out to the Pattersons in their 
grief over the loss of their daughter. RU-486 killed Holly Patterson, 
and the approval of this terrible drug during the Clinton 
administration was done in the name of political expediency instead of 
patient health.
  Let me just say briefly, Mr. Speaker, that the FDA violated Federal 
law and their own standards in approving RU-486. They approved it 
without the submission of data from adequate and well-controlled 
clinical trials. They created a final approval regimen for the use of 
RU-486 that does not reflect safeguards employed in the clinical trials 
on which FDA relied. They approved RU-486 using the expedited subpart H 
process which is only supposed to be used to approve drugs to treat 
serious or life-threatening illnesses. Unless you construe the killing 
of an unborn child, boy or girl, to be a disease or an illness, subpart 
H should have never been used.
  In violation of their own pediatric rule, they never tested the drug 
on adolescents, even though it is being used by adolescents. They have 
failed to impose and enforce restrictions on the use of RU-486 
commensurate with the risk that it poses to women, and women are dying. 
They failed to require the Population Council to honor in full its 
postapproval safety study commitments, and let us not forget that this 
drug is being manufactured in the People's Republic of China.
  It is important to keep in mind that with RU-486, we are talking 
about calibrating a poison designed to kill one person without causing 
harm or without killing another. The purpose of RU-486 is to chemically 
poison, this is the purpose of it, another human being. That it is 
dangerous physically and mentally and should never be sold to young 
people as a solution to their problems ought to be self-evident. 
Abortion, Mr. Speaker, is violence against children. We can do better 
for women. It is not in their interest that their children be killed 
with these powerful poisons.
  I would just say finally, Mr. Speaker, that the longer this poison is 
on the market, administered to young people by groups like Planned 
Parenthood, the more unborn boys and girls and women who take it will 
be at risk of death and injury.
  Let us not forget, as well, that Planned Parenthood is an 
organization that annually performs about 240,000 abortions. They make 
an enormous amount of money from the abortions that they provide, 
either surgically or chemically; and this is now another tool in their 
arsenal against unborn children. They ought to be known as Child Abuse, 
Incorporated for the large number of children that they have killed and 
continue to kill with U.S. subsidies both at the Federal and the State 
level.
  Mr. Speaker, again we call on the FDA. It is time to take this drug, 
this chemical poisoning of unborn children that is so dangerous to 
women, off the market.

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