On Sept. 17, a California teen died seven days after taking the abortion drug RU-486, and three days after taking its prostaglandin chaser, Cytotec.

An autopsy was performed but, miraculously, the Alameda County coroner is still investigating and said it may take several weeks to determine what killed Holly Patterson.

The cause of death likely will be listed as septic shock, which is one complication of an incomplete abortion. That will allow the Food and Drug Administration to maintain that the drug, which it rushed through the evaluation process and bent the rules to approve, has a good safety record and has not been directly linked to any deaths.

Even with the limited facts that have been made available on the complications from the abortion pill, this is a stretch.

Since RU-486 was approved on Sept. 28, 2000, Danco, the company that distributes the Chinese manufactured pill, has reported 400 complications to the FDA which include heart attacks, severe bleeding, life-threatening blood clots, respiratory distress and infection.

At least two other North American women are known to have died after taking this drug. In one, the cause of death was listed as a bacterial infection; in the other, the cause was listed as ectopic pregnancy.

However, we may never know the real death toll from RU-486 because the cause of death usually is sanitized with one or more medical terms that obscure the truth.

Abortion is not something that families of victims are anxious to talk about. We know what happened to Holly because of the courage of her family which has come forward to try to prevent others from making the same deadly mistake.

Holly's father, Monty Patterson, was unaware his daughter was pregnant or that she had been given the abortion drugs by a Planned Parenthood clinic until four hours before her death.

Holly's trouble began when she took two tablets of misoprostol, which is given as a follow-up to RU-486 to induce contractions to expel the dead embryo.

Cramps and bleeding are expected, but how much is too much? That is the unknown for most patients in this process where the rules are purposely vague and the reporting is left up to the abortion providers.

Holly's family thought she was having menstrual cramps. Her boyfriend took her to the hospital on Sept. 14. She was given painkillers and sent home. Two days later, she was rushed back to the hospital. By the time her father was called in and told what really happened, she was too weak to write or speak and had to blink her eyes and nod to communicate.

Here is what you need to know about this drug:

It appears that the FDA compromised the approval process, perhaps at the urging of the Clinton administration.

It was done under the "Accelerated Approval of New Drugs for Serious or Life-threatening Illnesses." In order to do this, the FDA had to classify "the termination of an unwanted pregnancy" as "a serious condition." This designation allows the FDA to approve drugs that "could be harmful and ineffective" prematurely.

This is unconscionable! A pregnancy is not an illness and the termination of one is not a serious condition. However, many unsuspecting women and girls are led to believe that, because the drug has been approved for use by the FDA, it is safe.

Furthermore, RU-486 is so ineffective when used alone, the FDA approved it for use with misoprostol, a prostaglandin that causes contractions but was developed as an ulcer drug. Misoprostol is marketed under the name Cytotec. Searle, the company that manufactures Cytotec, was so outraged that it issued a letter to physicians saying that this was an off-label use for this drug that was never tested or intended for the induction of labor or abortion. In other words, any physician who uses Cytotec for these purposes does so at great risk.

There are other indications that the FDA further manipulated the process. Dr. Mark Louviere, an Iowa physician, reported that he rendered emergency treatment to a woman who was a participant in the trials. He came forward after reading a press report that there were "no complications among the 238 women participants" in his state. Dr. Louviere told the Waterloo Courier, "If near death due to the loss of half of one's blood volume, surgery and a transfusion of four units of blood do not qualify as a complication, I don't know what does."

What really killed Holly Patterson? It was the deliberate politicizing of the FDA approval process for this abortion drug, a process that began during the Clinton administration and sadly has not been addressed by President Bush.