video and the continued responses that you ve gotten. you ve also received a lot of support for what you did as well to sort of demystify what it s like to have an abortion. interesting. angie jackson, thanks for your time. thank you so much for having me. all right. we heard angie s story. let s talk more about her method of abortion, this ru-486 pill. joining us to talk more about that, also about getting access to it, the safety of it, cnn medical correspondent elizabeth cohen. as you can imagine, we received a lot of response about even doing this story because abortion is such a controversial issue. and we really didn t want to get into a debate about abortion but rather look at what people are doing now, using social networking. and it brought about a lot of questions about ru-486 that we don t hear a lot about. i think there s some confusion. people might think it s the morning after pill. it s different. it s a way you can have an abortion up until about nine weeks pregna
it s basically a way to have an abortion via a drug rather than having a surgical abortion. and the way that it works is that a woman takes a pill that kills the pregnancy and then three days later she takes a pill that expels that pregnancy. that s the way that it works. what are the risks? there are some serious risks. one 1 in every 100,000 women who takes this has a fatal infection, a kind of infection called sepsis. places like planned parenthood spell it out on their website that you take these pills at home but you have to follow up. usually about 14 days after you ve started the process. this has to be medically supervised. you don t just go home and doit. you have to keep up with your doctor. a lot of people were confused that wrote in thinking it was illegal, but it is legal. it s legal. she went to planned parenthood and got it. right. it s legal. planned parenthood offers it. there are probably other people that offer it, too. it s legal in all 50 states. eliz
abortion. final question. what made you decide to do the ru-486? is that something you discussed with your boyfriend? how quick did you make that decision? why that route? sure. i investigated i looked at a couple of websites, one of which is i mnotsorry.net which includes a lot of personal abortion stories. i read how different women had felt. i thought the ru-486 abortion pill at home would be a more natural and comfortable experience. i was also too early in my pregnancy to be eligible for a surgical abortion. i was only four weeks. and so ru-486 was the medically recommended choice. angie jackson, very interesting. it definitely caught our attention. i actually didn t believe that you actually did it until i saw it. and it s pretty fascinating, the reasons that you have for doing it. and we re going to follow the
nearly killed her and her doctor told her not to have another child. so the 27-year-old florida woman took the abortion bill ru-486, pulling this private information out there for everyone to see. and it s gotten a lot of reaction. positive, negative, even threatening. so why tweet about it? angie joins me now live from tampa. so, angie, did it take a while to come to a comfort zone that you wanted to do this? tell me how you eventually decided this is how i m going to do it and i m going to let everybody see it happen. well, thank you so much for having me. i m a blogger, and i m actually writing a book birth and death, life of a newborn cult about my experiences. and a talk about a lot of controversial and hot button issues every day. so for me this wasn t even that different. this was just an extension of continuing to talk openly about
contraceptive. if you take it within three days of unprotected sex, it doesn t allow a fertilized egg to embed in the uterus and thus start a pregnancy. it has no effect once a woman is already pregnant, unlike ru-486, the so-called abortion drug. the whole issue of unwanted pregnancies in the u.s. military, it s a big issue? yeah, that s right. this decision is coming just two months after a commander in iraq tried to enforce a clause in the code of conduct that would make getting pregnant or getting a fellow soldier pregnant while you were deployed a punishable offense. that set off a firestorm, including a lot of pressure from some senators right here on capitol hill, and that order was eventually rescinded. the idea behind it was that get pregnant while you re deployed, or the men who contribute to that pregnancy, force the