Toronto: On June 22, members of Campaign Life Coalition picketed the Toronto consular offices of the French government – a major shareholder in Roussel-Uclaf.

Pro-lifers worldwide are opposing the plans of the huge pharmaceutical company, Roussel-Uclaf, to market the “abortion pill” RU-486 in France and China.  Thousands of women in 16 other countries have already been ‘guinea pigs’ for the deadly abortifacients.

In trials conducted by Roussel-Uclaf and the World Health Organization, RU-486 induced abortions in 80 per cent of the women who took the drug within two weeks of a missed period.  When combined with prostaglandin – a drug that causes labour – the rate of induced abortions climbed to 95 per cent.  Later in the pregnancy, however, actual expulsion of the unborn child rarely takes place.  Instead, the mother undergoes prolonged bleeding.  Taking the drug too late in pregnancy may also artificially shorten or lengthen her menstrual cycle with disastrous consequences for her fertility.

Abortionists in Canada, including Marion Powell and Henry Morgentaler are impressed with the possibilities of RU-486, as a means of insuring the ‘reproductive freedom’ of women.  Because it is a medical and not a surgical procedure, women will be able to abort their children in the privacy of their homes, away from the interference of church, state, court and clinic.

In the United States, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts has proposed amending the government’s existing family planning programme to permit funding for “development, evaluation and brining to the marketplace of new and improved contraceptive devices, drugs and methods,” including RU-486.

Like its other proponents who believe that human life does not begin at fertilization, Kennedy misrepresents the new drug as no different from any other contraceptive.

Science and philosophy reasonably conclude that the human person at birth was a human person at conception.  It is therefore plain and simple that, in the words of the Criminal Code, RU-486 is “a noxious thing”.  It is not only deadly to the unborn child.  “Because it plays with fertility cycles,” says Dr. Colin Merry, president of Canadian Physicians for Life, “it is a sociological disaster waiting to happen.”