RU-486 FDA Approval—Statement by Corri Daniele     9/28/2000

My name is Corri Daniele and I counsel post-abortive women through Sanctity of Life Pregnancy Help Center in Fairfax, Virginia. I am also a post-abortive mother. In the past 16 years, I've never found a woman who was grateful that she “chose” abortion for her child. We will never see a bumper sticker declaring, “I am the proud parent of an aborted child!” Abortion has been extremely damaging to women's emotional, and many times to their physical, health.

RU-486 would magnify the consequences, which I, and so many others, have already experienced from choosing abortion. For most post-abortion women, the identity of the fetus, or child, was shrouded. Terms like “tissue,” “blood clots” or “it's like having a wart removed” are verbal tactics used by Planned Parenthood and abortion providers to minimize the humanity of the mother's child, to make it easier to kill him or her. Most of us truly believed the clinic personnel, that it was only “tissue” in our wombs. We found out too late that what we terminated was our child—many after having procured 3-5 abortions.

As a young teen, confused, scared and immature, I chose abortion for 5 of my children. The reason this destructive behavior finally stopped was not due to the half-hearted warnings given at the clinic in regards to multiple abortions, but because I saw the remains of my 11-week-old child after it was crushed to death. Its tiny rib cage haunted me for 11 years, until I received the help I needed to deal with the aftermath of my choices. Though I stopped the killing, my self-destructive behavior continued, with alcohol abuse, promiscuity and even a near suicide.

I soon found this pattern to be repeated in other post-abortion women. Those of us who muster up the courage to seek help can be healed, but there are millions more women who won't be able to come to terms with their pain. This is due in part to the lie that abortion does not have consequences to women.

May I propose that RU-486, which, it’s claimed, would make abortion “safer and simpler,” will do neither, but will only increase despair and damage to women. The fact is, women will see and feel the effects of their abortions—whether chemical or surgical—sooner or later.

Is it right for the consciences of the medical professionals to be seemingly lightened, as some of them may no longer have to view their tiny victims, or because it is the mother taking the pill and not the doctor carving or sucking out the baby? Any easing of the doctor’s conscience will be at the cost of more mothers being devastated, by seeing the remains of their baby or grieving for the child they actively aborted.

A death of a child, public or private, can only bring sorrow to her mother. And for us who allow it, much shame.

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