Op-ed: Where is the outcry in the case of young, Hawaiian women used as guinea pigs in abortion study?

There is a good reason why we at Texas Right to Life call the abortion industry “predatory.”  The latest example emerges from the state of Hawaii, where girls as young as fourteen are being used by researchers to glean study results on bleeding during late-term abortions (from 18 to 24 weeks).  The study is entitled, “Effects of Oxytocin on Bleeding Outcomes During Dilation and Evacuation,” and the conclusions will not simply be reached based on observation of abortion procedures.  Instead, researchers will manipulate the administration of oxytocin to women undergoing late-term abortions (administering the drug to some while withholding the drug from others) to determine the effects of oxytocin on the bleeding outcome of the abortion.

If this doesn’t sound like a big deal, then consider that hemorrhage is one of the most common side effects of late-term abortion, and oxytocin plays a crucial role in the control of bleeding and prevention of hemorrhage.  Apparently researchers are comfortable using teenage girls and young women as guinea pigs by withholding a potentially life-saving treatment.  The study, which is being conducted by the University of Hawaii in conjunction with the University of Washington, is seeking 166 participants – meaning 166 mothers to use as guinea pigs, and 166 more pain-capable babies to kill in gruesome dismemberment abortions for the sake of research.

But there must be an outcry from the feminists who pride themselves on protecting “women’s rights,” right?  Actually, all we have heard from the women’s rights movement regarding this study is the chirping of crickets.  Because, remember, their motto is abortion, no matter what.

No matter the effects on a 14-year-old who is carrying a baby who is already viable, for example.  The abortion lobby wants data, and so that is what the abortion lobby will get, no matter whose rights and well-being must be trampled in the process (and, need we even remind our readers of the horrors of a late-term abortion for the preborn child?).  

Hawaii is fertile ground for such a study.  The islands’ abortion rate ranks ninth out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia.  The state has virtually no restrictions on abortion throughout all nine months of pregnancy.  Abortionists there use a late-term abortion method that involves removing the baby piece-by-piece after a drawn-out process of dilating the mother’s cervix.  Abortion is widely accepted as normal in Hawaii, as evidenced by the fact that the state has zero Pro-Life groups on college campuses, while the continental United States boast a collective 750+ Pro-Life college groups.  What better place to carry out an inhumane abortion trial than a state where little to no opposition should be expected?

We are reminded of another time in history when women were used and discarded for the sake of “reproductive health” research: the Puerto Rico Pill trials of the 1950s.  The controversial trial of the earliest birth control pill – which contained twice the level of synthetic hormones as today’s Pill – was conducted in Puerto Rico precisely because women in that commonwealth could be easily taken advantage of by misogynistic men.  The island was heavily populated, and government officials were readily complicit in any endeavor that might control the population by preventing births.  The women, eager for a way to control their family size without turning to abortion or sterilization, quickly filled the trial. 

However, the heads of the study, John Rock and Gregory Pincus, possessed so little regard for the women of Puerto Rico that they did not even inform study participants that the pills were being administered as part of a clinical trial, and that the effects the drug were theretofore unstudied on a large scale.  During the study, three women died mysteriously, and their deaths were never investigated by researchers.

Furthermore, 17% of the women complained of side-effects so severe that the lone female at the helm of the study told the two men who had initiated the research that the Pill must not go to market in the US until the side-effects were resolved.  But Rock and Pincus were so voracious in their hunger to distribute the Pill among the continental United States that they wholly wrote-off their colleague’s insistence and obtained FDA approval to disseminate the drug in the mass market.

History is replete with examples of manipulation, brutality, and blatant disregard toward women simply because they are women.  Even to this day, male child preference, for example, persists in countries like China and India.  But in modern America, where women are free to choose their education, their career path, and their lifestyle, where is the outrage over the blatant abuse of American women by the withholding of a life-saving drug for the sole purpose of observing whether a young woman will hemorrhage?  Misogynistic men are no longer the threat to American women and their children; rather, the new perpetrator of anti-woman injustice is a largely female-led movement so committed to abortion that the lives of women – born and preborn – are an afterthought.