Parliament Votes to Bring RU486 to Australia.

Last month the Australian Parliament voted to take steps that would allow RU486, the abortion pill, to be sold there.

Since 1996, abortifacients like RU486 had been listed as "restricted goods" in Australia, which the government's Minister of Health had authority to block. In the fall of last year, however, several pro-abortion lawmakers launched a campaign to have the restriction on abortifacients removed and have the decision on the drug's safety, quality, and efficacy placed in the hands of the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), Australia's counterpart to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Votes in the Australian Senate on February 9 and the House on February 16 accomplished that purpose.

Although it may still take several months for RU486 to wend its way through the TGA's application, evaluation, and approval processes, both supporters and opponents of the abortion pill expect the TGA to eventually approve the drug.

At issue in the debate was whether RU486 was simply another therapeutic drug, like aspirin or an antibiotic, designed to treat some illness or ailmentthe kind of drugs routinely considered by the TGAor whether RU486's function as a killing agent taken by totally healthy women put the drug in a different category altogether.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, speaking before the debate, urged House members to uphold the authority of Health Minister Tony Abbot. Howard said that "to suggest that this drug RU486 is just another drug is patently absurd and I believe to treat it as any other drug is unsustainable" (Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) Radio,2/16/06).

Abbott himself said there was a "bizarre double standard" in place when "someone who kills a pregnant woman's baby is guilty of murder but a woman who aborts an unborn baby is simply exercising 'choice'" (ABC Radio, 2/16/06).

In November 2005, as pro-abortion politicians began pushing the pill in the press and in Parliament, Abbott released a report by the Health Ministry's Chief Medical Officer John Horvath and Andrew Child, a former president of the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, indicating that the drug would likely prove dangerous, particularly for Australia's rural populations. According to the report,