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Pregnant Woman
Accidentally Given Powerful Abortifacient Part Two of Three By Dave Andrusko ABC News is reporting that a pregnant woman in Colorado mistakenly received a powerful drug used as an abortifacient instead of an antibiotic, placing her baby in grave danger. A week ago Mareen Silva, then six-weeks pregnant, inadvertently took methotrexate, an extremely powerful drug ordinarily used to fight cancer and rheumatoid arthritis. According to Susan Donaldson James, the drug was prescribed for another woman with the same last name and a similar first name. The child is particular vulnerable to the drug during the first trimester because the drug is designed to attack fast growing cells. "I took it because I thought it was mine," Silva told ABC's Denver affiliate KMGH. "I came back and looked at the bottle and it wasn't my name." When she began to feel nauseated, she called her doctor who "immediately told me to try and make myself vomit to see if I could get the medicine to come back up," she said. Rushed to Platte Valley Medical Center, doctors administered charcoal to absorb the methotrexate. "This is my first child, so it's really difficult to deal with," Silva said. The pharmacy apologized or the mix-up, but "Sorry's not going to cut it," she said. "I'm going to have to deal with this for a long time. My baby could have deformities. There's a lot that goes with it." Marcel Casavant, chief of pharmacology and toxology at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, said Silva's unborn child had "50-50 chance" of having problems. "The good news is that a lot of other women have been exposed inadvertently to the drug during pregnancy and not every baby gets a birth defect," he said. "They end up just perfectly fine." Buried in the latest abortion numbers from the Guttmacher Institute is that 6% of the chemically-induced abortions used methotrexate. (The remainder were RU-486 abortions.) Methotrexate, like RU-486, has been used in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com. If you like, join those who are following me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/daveha |
