Expert: Pat G - 9/15/2009

Question
how far along in your pregnancy can you take the abortion pill please could you answer this as my brother has got his 16 year old gf pregnant and i would like to know thankyou very much

Answer
Hi, kayleigh,

Your brother has NO RIGHT to expect his girlfriend to use the abortion pill. It can KILL her. The manufacturer specifically says it is NOT to be used by pregnant women. Your brother has a duty to protect his girlfriend. There are several ways this can kill. One way is by causing toxic shock syndrome. That kills within hours, usually before emergency room personnel can even diagnose the problem. It can cause the uterus to have such violent contractions that it will rupture. It can cause a woman to bleed to death. Depending on how heavy the bleeding is, that could happen within hours as well. Sometimes the only way to save her life is emergency hysterectomy, which means she will never have another child.

There is a very narrow window during which the pills will even "work". We don't know the long term consequences of using them, but we do know if it DOES "work", there is an increased risk of breast cancer. It usually hits in a woman's 40's, and about 25% of the time, it kills. It can even happen earlier. If she has any history of breast cancer in her near female relatives, getting breast cancer is a virtual certainty. Also, if the pills don't "work", there may be birth defects in the baby. Although these are not extremely common, most abortionists will insist on doing a surgical abortion to complete it. And that carries enough dangers that people have written books about it. Details on request. In addition, a woman has an increased risk of dying from violent means in the year after abortion, including a heightened risk of suicide which is six times greater. Other causes of death can include homicide, auto accident, drug and alcohol abuse, self-abuse such as cutting, anorexia, and bulimia. Also, the relationship has a 90% chance of breaking up. An additional problem is that women are coming to me and they are now married, and they don't want their husbands to find out they had an abortion. But it's difficult to keep something a secret when it can increase the chances a woman will never conceive another child, or she will have a high risk pregnancy. It's not worth it.

I'm not going to help you in any way to help your brother do this to his girlfriend. She deserves better. He should stick by her. He helped her get pregnant, and he would suffer NONE of the medical consequences. It is totally unfair for him to even AGREE that she should take this risk.

There are two other issues. If I give you this information, I would be practicing medicine without a license and could get into a lot of trouble. Not that abortion is medicine. It's not, but that's how authorities would look at it. The other is that I won't help anybody hurt his girlfriend.

PLEASE tell your brother to take on the responsibility he has created and stand by his girlfriend. If she insists on harming herself this way, then he shouldn't be a party to it, either.

If they need help for her to be able to carry to term, I can tell you where the resources are. If you go to the link below, and choose your country from the country list, you will get a list of organizations that can help. There are many of them in UK. There are multiple pages for England. And if you click on details, it will give you contact information.

http://www.heartbeatinternational.org/worldwide_directory.asp

If they don't want to parent the child, adoption is available, and adoptive parents usually pay all expenses.

Please let me know what happens.