Article On Ru 486 Essay Research Paper — страница 2

zealots bent on forbidding abortion at all cost. In fact, a few such abortion opponents were at the helm of Roussel Uclaf, the very company that developed RU-486 back in 1980. (1980!) In late 1989, two years after the safety and efficacy of the drug were established in French clinical trials, these executives?as well as the Roussel’s head of security, who was recruited into the effort because of his strong antiabortion beliefs?tried to overpower their pro-choice colleagues within the company and force Roussel to abandon the drug. The antiabortion faction of the company had already written a press release announcing the decision, when an 11th-hour countercampaign saved the first major abortion breakthrough from oblivion. A petition with more than 2000 signatures and a flurry of

press coverage quashed the anti-RU-486 rebellion. Despite political opposition, the French minister of health declared RU-486 “the moral property of women.” By April of 1990, the drug was on the French market. 1999: Mifepristone is approved in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Spain, Finland, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, and Israel. The Population Council and Danco, a group of investors formed to market mifepristone, submit the requested information to the FDA. Approval is widely expected by early 2000. 2000: February?The FDA issues another approvable letter for the use of mifepristone in early abortions, but says more information is still needed. June?The Washington Post reports that the FDA is considering approving mifepristone with stringent restrictions. The

agency sets another approval deadline for September 30. July?Representative Tom Coburn’s amendment to an agriculture appropriations bill, which would forbid the approval of mifepristone, is voted down. September 30?By this date, if it holds to its schedule, the FDA will have approved, rejected, or requested still more information about mifepristone. TIME: THE ABORTION PILL OCTOBER 9, 2000 VOL. 156 NO. 15 In the meantime, abortion has become steadily less available in the U.S. There are no providers at all in 86% of U.S. counties; 91% of abortions occur in easily targeted clinics, and 1 in 4 women has to travel at least 50 miles for treatment. Doctors still see women who try to induce miscarriage by taking quinine pills, or provoke their boyfriends to jump on them, or come into

emergency rooms with electrical cords hanging out of them. Since 1988, when mifepristone was first approved in Europe, abortion-rights activists have fought to introduce it to the U.S. as the first alternative to surgical abortion. The FDA under President Bush banned its import in 1989, citing safety concerns. On his third day in office, President Clinton lifted the ban and ordered the FDA to begin safety testing. Developer Roussel Uclaf, meanwhile, sick of getting hammered by both sides, donated U.S. patent rights for mifepristone to the Population Council, a nonprofit reproductive-rights group founded 50 years ago by John D. Rockefeller. The council had to steer the drug through U.S. trials, file the applications for approval, weather the political storms and lawsuits that

followed every step of the process. No wonder it took nearly eight years. Even advocates who had been hoping for this ruling for years were surprised at how few restrictions came with it. Though the agency had ruled mifepristone “safe and effective” back in 1996, it took four more years to find an acceptable manufacturer and figure out distribution. Last summer the FDA hinted that it was thinking of playing very tough: that only doctors who currently do surgical abortions would be allowed to prescribe mifepristone; that there might be some special certification required, or a rule that the doctor have access to an emergency room less than one hour away. All of that would have made the approval of the pill almost meaningless; abortion would still be unavailable in vast swaths

of the country. But last week’s ruling said that to prescribe the drug, a doctor must be able only to date the pregnancy conclusively and, if anything goes wrong, provide surgical intervention, either to complete the abortion or to stop heavy bleeding. “All this says is that physicians prescribing this should be good doctors,” says Dr. Wendy Chavkin, an ob-gyn at Columbia School of Public Health. In 1998, when the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation polled family practitioners about their interest in using mifepristone once it was approved and available, 45% of doctors responding said they were “very” or “somewhat” likely to use it–even though only 3% of them had performed surgical abortions. But at the time of the survey, the drug was still crawling through the