Nation Topics - Regulations | The Nation

It took twelve years for the FDA to approve mifepristone--also known as
RU-486--and most of that time had less to do with medicine than with the
politics of abortion. Still, the late-September decision was a
tremendous victory for American women. In approving RU-486, the FDA
showed that science and good sense can still carry the day, even in an
election year.

The long delay may even backfire against the drug's opponents. In 1988,
when mifepristone was legalized in France, it was a medical novelty as
well as a political flashpoint. Today, it's been accepted in thirteen
countries, including most of Western Europe; it's been taken by more
than a half-million women and studied, it sometimes seems, by almost as
many researchers. By the end of the approval process, the important
medical professional organizations--the AMA, the American Medical
Women's Association, the American College of Obstetricians and
Gynecologists--had given mifepristone their blessing; impressive
percentages of Ob-Gyns and family practitioners said they would consider
prescribing it; thousands of US women had taken it in clinical trials
and given it high marks, with 97 percent in one study saying they would
recommend it to a friend. Against this background of information and
experience, the antichoicers' attempt to raise fears about the drug's
safety sounds desperate and insincere.

In a normal country, RU-486 would simply be another abortion method, its
use a matter of personal preference (in France it's the choice of 20
percent of women who have abortions, while in Britain only 6 percent opt
for it). But in the United States, where abortion clinics are besieged
by fanatics and providers wear bulletproof vests, mifepristone's main
significance lies in its potential to widen access to abortion,
especially in those 86 percent of US counties that possess no abortion
clinic, by making it private--doctors unable or unwilling to perform
surgical abortions could prescribe it, and women could take it at home.

It is unlikely, however, that Mifeprex, as the drug will be known when
it comes on the market, will prove to be the magic bullet that ends the
war on abortion by depriving antichoice activists of identifiable
targets. The nation has been retreating from Roe v. Wade for a
quarter-century, and a good portion of the patchwork of state and local
regulations intended to discourage surgical abortion will apply to
Mifeprex as well: parental notification and consent laws (thirty-two
states), waiting periods (nineteen states), biased counseling and
cumbersome reporting and zoning requirements. States in which
antichoicers control the legislatures will surely rush to encumber
Mifeprex with hassles, and small-town and rural physicians in particular
may find it hard to prescribe Mifeprex without alerting antichoice
activists. Doctors are a cautious bunch, and the anticipated flood of
new providers may turn out to be a trickle, at least at first. Abortion
rights activists should also brace themselves for a backlash from their
hard-core foes: Just after the FDA's decision was announced, a Catholic
priest crashed his car into an Illinois abortion clinic and hacked at
the building with an ax.

But in the long run, Mifeprex will make abortion more acceptable. In
poll after poll Americans have said that when it comes to terminating a
pregnancy, the earlier the better. Mifeprex, which has been approved for
the first forty-nine days after a woman's last menstrual period--when
the embryo's size varies from a pencil point to a grain of rice--may
well prove not to arouse the same kinds of anxieties and moral qualms as
surgical abortion. Then, too, Americans are used to taking pills. That,
of course, is what the antichoicers are afraid of.