Access to Abortion: A College Student's Perspective on RU-486, Exams of English Language

Download Access to Abortion: A College Student's Perspective on RU-486 and more Exams English Language in PDF only on Docsity! 1 ENC 3310 Analysis Final Draft “I’ll have One Abortion and a Side Order of Guilt, Please.” Honestly, I like having sex. And I like knowing that in case any thing were to go wrong—say my boyfriend’s condom broke or we threw caution to the wind in a fit of passion—I could have a way out. I could go to the Student Health Care Center on campus and get a set of pills that would take that little knot of doubt and uncertainty in my stomach and knead it until it disappeared completely. I like knowing that the little “morning after pill” I just took will take care of anything that happened in the last 72 hours. Basically, I like the idea of not having to face the consequence of my actions. Fortunately, we live in a society that has developed the technology to let me avoid the consequences. I like that we live in a country that provides college girls with birth control until they are ready to have children. I like that college girls can get the morning after pill on those dazed mornings when they honestly can’t remember what happened the night before or when they have had a night of crazy sex with their boyfriends to celebrate their two-month anniversary. The only thing I don’t like is thinking about what would happen if I was to get pregnant while still in college. That fateful phone call from the doctor would not send me into giddy cheer. I would not take my boyfriend out to dinner and pop the news over dessert, I would not argue with him over which set of parents got to know first, I would not start picking out colors for the nursery. I would start panicking. I would cry, I would pray, I would get another test. I would become a statistic: half the pregnancies in America each year are unplanned and half of those end in abortion. I 2 would have to decide how mine would end. I would have to decide if I really was pro-life or pro-my life. With graduation from college only a year away, I think I would selfishly choose to be pro-my life. But only under one condition: that I use the RU-486 early option abortion pill. If you would have asked me three years ago what I thought about abortion, I would have told you I did not believe in it no matter what. If you asked me today, I would tell you that I believe it is right to a certain point. I think RU-486 set that point at seven weeks. You see, you have to use the pill within 49 days of your last period or it will not work, otherwise you would have to have a surgical procedure. I know it wouldn’t take me more than 49 days to decide if I want to keep the baby; it actually makes me wonder why would a woman wait longer than that if she knew she wanted an abortion? Honestly, I can justify killing the baby if it is still a lump of bloody mass that can be flushed out. I would like to think that as a college student I could have an option like the pill that doesn’t sound as messy as “surgical abortion.” I like that I could once again avoid consequences. RU-486 has been helping couples avoid consequences since the Food and Drug Administration approved the so-called French abortion pill on September 28, 2000, making the United States the 28th country in the world to legalize the drug. They did so after more than a decade of controversy and legislative battles. In the late 1980s the first Bush administration placed mifepristone—the main chemical in RU-486—on a list of drugs banned by the FDA from importation into the U.S. for personal use, even though mifepristone has many potential uses beyond pregnancy termination, including the treatment of breast cancer, meningioma, Cushing's syndrome, glaucoma, and 5 The FDA approved the pill knowing that these obstacles stood in the way of RU- 486 becoming an “oops-I-made-a-mistake pill.” Physicians must undergo a strict approval process and must be able to provide a woman with surgical options in case of incomplete abortions. But since the approved physicians usually work at private clinics,3 the process is only very slowly becoming popular. Knowing all of this. Could I, as a junior in college, really use my RU-486 option? I would like to think that if the side effects aren’t much worse than a regular abortion, and if I could afford it, then I would be able to choose the method that is right for me. But college health care facilities around the country are not seeing it that way. It is true that many colleges are refusing to offer the pill to their students because they cannot comply with the entire medical guideline mandatory to the procedure.4 But not all of them argue this way. Barbara Finch, a Republican State representative from Iowa argues against availability on college campuses: How a person acts is often rooted in the consequences they face because of their actions. College is a crash course in life as an adult, where actions should and do have consequences. Given that, does it make any sense at all that abortion on demand should come in a pill? Drugs are no big deal on campus, be it alcohol, tobacco or something much harder. A baby’s life isn’t just a hangover you can just sleep off. 3 The private clinics often times have to buy the pill ahead of time and are not guaranteed it will be sold later. 4 Many representatives argue that the drug is too expensive presents the possibility of taxpayer dollars being used to encourage abortions. 6 She talks as if abortions aren’t available in the “real world” and that once we all get on that ship called The Real Life, it will sail us directly to Responsibility Island, where no one ever makes a mistake and forgiveness is just an ideal discussed in old books. For those of us who do have sex in college, birth control pills and morning after pills are already letting us off without facing the consequences. By restricting the availability of R-486 to the students in her district, Finch is not teaching lessons on real life because in real life the safety net that RU-486 provides is spread out beneath the masses of “adult” women who need more than just one morning after to decide about the rest of their lives. Yes, taking RU-486 would let me avoid facing the consequences of having sex, but taking it would also provide me with a new perspective and new eyes that can face the future of my life. It is just one pill to add to a list of pills that give women options. And it is the option I would choose were I to get that phone call from the doctor. It would already be a hard decision to make so leave the guilt up to me, Barbara Finch. 7 References 1. Finch, Barbara. “College No Place for RU-486.” CNSNews.com. 5.25.2001 2. Harlap, Susan. Kathyrn Kost and Jacqueline Darroch Forrest. Preventing Pregnancy, Protecting Health: A New Look at Birth Control Choices in the United States. New York: The Alan Guttmacher Institute. 2001. 3. Hogenson, Scott.” Abortion Clinic Police in Probe of Woman’s Death.” CNSNews.com. 5.03.2002 4. Spitz, Irving, et al. "Early Pregnancy Termination with Mifepristone and Misoprostol in the United States," New England Journal of Medicine, 338(18) April 30, 1998, 1241-1247.