(LifeSiteNews) — In 2022, 19-year-old Rheanna Laderoute took abortion pills in Ontario, Canada. Ten days later, she went into septic shock and died. The Globe and Mail broke the story on August 27, but focused not on the dangers of the abortion pill, but on a “system failure.”
According to the Mail, when Laderoute discovered her pregnancy, she told nobody. Instead, she drove an hour from her home in Newmarket, Ontario, to an abortion clinic in Brampton, where she was given Mifegymiso (colloquially known as the abortion pill).
“Chemical abortions are committed using two drugs: mifepristone, which first kills the preborn child by starving him or her of nutrients, and then misoprostol, which induces contractions and expels the body of the preborn baby,” Live Action noted.
Two weeks after taking the abortion pills, the young woman was bleeding heavily and experiencing excruciating pain. Laderoute went to the emergency room at Southlake Regional Health Centre where doctors did an ultrasound. The ultrasound identified no “fetal or placental tissue,” and Laderoute was sent home with a recommendation to go to a pregnancy clinic.
According to Live Action News, “the clinic apparently attempted one call to Laderoute, and when that failed, they did not follow up.”
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Laderoute’s pain continued to worsen. A week after her first visit to the emergency room, the teenager was taken back to the emergency room by ambulance with a peritonitic abdomen, a severe and life-threatening inflammation of the peritoneum (the abdominal cavity lining). She was crying and “clutching at her stomach.” Laderoute was given morphine, antibiotics, and other painkillers, and after a doctor ordered bloodwork, a urine sample, and imaging, she was sent home again.
Laderoute’s third visit to the emergency room took place on the following day. This time, she showed clear signs of deadly sepsis. As is the norm in the Canadian healthcare system, Laderoute was not seen for hours and was finally put on IV antibiotics until she had been in the hospital for over eight hours. According to a report:
Nurses noted that Laderoute’s condition was declining, and repeatedly suggested she be transferred to the ICU, but those recommendations were ignored. They also asked the ICU doctor on call, Dr. Albert Yun-Pai Chang, to insert a central line as her veins were collapsing, but he refused, and also continued to refuse admission to the ICU. Only once her heart stopped, with medical staff working 22 minutes to resuscitate her, was she taken to the ICU. But by then it was too late; she had gone into multi-organ failure, and after two more cardiac arrests, she eventually died.
Rheanna Laderoute’s sister, Kassandra Costabile, is seeking accountability for Laderoute’s death; the Globe and Mail highlighted the consistent failures of the medical system in dealing with the young woman’s worsening condition, as well as her multiple visits to the emergency room. But what the Canadian press ignored is the dangers inherent to taking the abortion pill, not only to the pre-born child – the purpose of the pill regimen is to kill the developing human being in the womb – but to the woman.
In fact, mifepristone has a black box warning for sepsis, and as Live Action News noted, a “recent analysis found a 22 times higher rate of ‘serious adverse events’ (complications) resulting from mifepristone (the abortion pill) than what is currently reported by the FDA” and that “nearly 11% of women experience these complications, which include hemorrhaging, infection, sepsis, transfusions, hospitalization, and more.”
Indeed, a devastating exposé of the abortion pill in First Things last year noted that “medical abortions induce an unnatural process, one in which up to 20 percent of women experience a complication – four times the complication rate of surgical abortion.” Abortion activists claim that pro-life laws harm women; the reality is that frequently, the harms they cite are a direct result of the abortion pills that they aggressively promote.
The fundamental cause of Laderoute’s death was not merely system failure. It was the abortion pills that ended not one life as intended, but two.
