The Mysteries of RU-486

...Other studies linked the early oral contraceptives with cancer...

...By contrast, surgical abortion is 99 percent effective...

...studies of RU-486 on a Roussel license, including a series at the University of Southern California's medical school...

...Invariably into this discussion of ways of completely privatizing abortion—thus removing it from the purview of the law and the right-to-life movement—comes the abortion pill, RU-486...

...That is, no woman has yet died from taking the pill...

...Women know the contraceptive revolution has been influenced more by the pursuit of population control and profit than by the need for safe birth control," wrote Sybil Shainwald, a past president of the Network, in a recent issue of USA Today...

...In the seven years since Dr...

...The intense promotion of the Pill and IUD by the population-control industry came in the face of overwhelming evidence of unpleasant side effects for both...

...But what if RU-486 started to circulate illegally—or even legally—in those Third World countries, where there are not enough doctors to supervise every dose and patients may not be sophisticated enough to return for the crucial follow-up visits...

...Each kind of contraceptive seemed to hold itself out as the fairy godmother's touch that would painlessly sever the pesky link between sexual delight and procreation...

...The heavy NOW/FFM drum-beating for RU-486 has created a double bind for the 10,000-member National Women's Health Network, which does not want to be seen as anti-abortion or aligned with the right-to-lifers but has serious qualms about introducing reproductive products onto the market without adequate testing...

...Furthermore, because timing is so critical with RU-486, she will learn, via a pelvic examination (feet in stirrups) and ultrasound, not only that she is pregnant, but just how pregnant she is...

...But there are no scientific data on this question...

...About 13 million women currently use second-generation Pills, although smokers and women over thirty-five are not supposed to take them...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989...

...Women and the Dalkon Shield, and Nightmare: Women and the Dalkon Shield by Susan Perry and Jim 19 Dawson...

...Following the feminist and population-control lead has been a generally bovine press...

...At last report, those Pills, too, have been linked to breast cancer, but the FDA has decided no extra warnings are necessary...

...That pill, as this article will explain, is far from a do-it-yourself abortion fix, but there are many optimistic souls who would like to think it is...

...It's a complicated issue," says executive director Victoria Leonard...

...That is typically about a three-week window...

...By 1980, 60 million women worldwide had tried IUDs...

...rr he search for "better" contraceptives and "better" abortifacients is at bottom an effort to neutralize via technology the blind, brute hand of Mother Nature, who drives male and female inexorably together to couple and to reproduce the species...

...It is a goal in which, as that Population Council expert declared twenty-seven years ago, the scientific truth is subservient to ideology and the individual female patient is expendable...

...Another NOW assertion is that "chemical abortion entails even less risk than a vacuum aspiration abortion," the suction procedure that is the most common form of surgical abortion in the United States...

...It is time-consuming (the abortion part alone lasts three days, and the clinical part comprises a week's worth of visits), bloody (one woman in a Swedish trial required a transfusion, although for most it resembles an exceedingly heavy menstrual period, with bleeding lasting on average from six to sixteen days, occasionally up to thirty), and painful (many women require analgesic shots to ease them through...

...In the long run, the women's rights advocates may discover they have been used simply to serve the goal of the population control enthusiasts—cutting the birth rate by any means possible...

...At first, it was supposed to be the long-desired "morning after" pill, preventing the fertilized egg from implanting itself on to the uterine wall as normally happens a week after conception...

...In my dormitory, girls ostentatiously flashed their plastic Pill packets and condescendingly touted its virtues to naives still using the diaphragm...

...A June 1988 article in Mother Jones magazine is typical of the general level of media ignorance...

...pharmaceutical industry is steering clear of RU-486...

...These methods, although touted by feminist health clinics, are generally considered dangerous, certainly for the mother, but also for any baby who survives them to birth...

...Just by way of contrast to RU-486, another Population Council product, the new Nor-plant contraceptive—a set of hormone-releasing capsules to be injected into a woman's arm and designed to last five years—has been in the works for twenty years and still does not have final FDA approval...

...Planned Parenthood lobbied heavily last year in hopes of defeating an amendment that would have exempted abortifacients from a products-liability reform bill in Congress...

...Then the Roussel researchers discovered the drug did not work immediately after conception...

...At the behest of pro-choice members of Congress, a four-year reauthorization bill for Title X federal family-planning assistance now contains a $10 million grant for "development, evaluation and bringing to the marketplace of new and improved contraceptive devices, drugs and methods...

...W hat all of this bodes for RU-486 is uncertain...

...Sadly, many home remedies could damage a fetus instead of kill it," was Newsweek magazine's rather odd comment on the subject...

...pharmaceutical company to date has shown the slightest interest in manufacturing or marketing it...

...All these issues (perhaps paradoxically, revolving around women's role as mothers, not as trailblazers of sexual liberation) fell by the wayside as the march became focused on abortion alone...

...tive system, producing the estrogen that releases the egg for fertilization and the progesterone that stimulates the building of the uterine lining and the nourishment of the fetus for its first eight weeks...

...The home remedies range from cocaine (it can induce uterine contractions) to something called "menstrual extraction," which involves a syringe, plastic fishtank tubing, and a Mason jar...

...All the published studies strictly warn that women on whom the drug proves ineffective cannot change their minds but must undergo a surgical abortion...

...For example, one press release still calls it a "menses inducer...

...No doctor who fears malpractice liability would likely expose a non-pregnant patient to the risk of hemorrhaging...

...F rom a reading of the somewhat scant English-language medical literature on RU-486—articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology—the abortion pill emerges as one of the creepiest human concoctions around...

...It convened the First International Conference on Intra-uterine Contraception in 1962...

...All chemical methods of fertility control are designed to interfere in some fashion with the complex hormonal process of the female reproducFrom a reading of the scant English-language medical literature, the abortion pill emerges as one of the creepiest human concoctions around...

...The drug's molecular structure resembles that of DES, the 1950s anti-miscarriage drug that, by altering the fetus's DNA, tended to cause cervical cancer in the daughters of the women who took it...

...O ne might well ask: Why bother with this drug at all...

...If this passes—a Senate version has already been cleared for a floor vote—it would put the federal government into the contraceptive marketing business for the first time...

...News stories about RU-486 continue to call it a "morning-after" pill, although many mornings must pass before it is effective...

...alone) or, even worse, the Dalkon Shield, whose $2.5 billion in punitive assessments, with another $12 billion possibly to come, forced the manufacturer, A. H. Robins Co., into bankruptcy court (a payout plan was recently approved...

...So it was next touted as a kind of menstrual regulator, a drug a woman could take every month and not even know if she was aborting, presumably easing her conscience...

...In 1985, the National Right to Life Committee was instrumental in Upjohn Co.'s decision to stop making its labor-inducing prostaglandin (another extremely painful abortifacient) and to disband its entire fertility research division...

...No company wants to see its product go the lawsuit-dotted way of the first generation of birth control pills (millions of dollars in damage awards, including $2.75 million in punitive damages against the Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp...

...Perhaps the individual patient is expendable in the general scheme of things, particularly if the infection she acquires is sterilizing but not lethal," one expert declared...

...You have to realize that the population movement has an ideological bent, and that, as far as science is concerned, it's not just concerned with finding out the truth," says Mintz, a former Washington Post health reporter...

...Some have suggested it may be prohibitive for a private company even to obtain the necessary insurance to perform the clinical tests...

...Is surgical abortion actually riskier than anyone has let on...

...In late July, at the organization's annual convention in Cincinnati, NOW delegates voted to demand that the U.S...

...12,000 French women are said to have used it so far...

...Meanwhile, no U.S...

...The drug seems to suppress ovulation for three to seven months after it is taken...

...One of the fascinating aspects of the RU-486 controversy, and also of the recent abortion-rights protests centered on the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services Inc., is how the women's movement has lately turned into strictly an abortion movement...

...Wrong on all counts, Miss Fraser...

...As with RU-486, the Population Council was a major player, heavily promoting both the birth control pill (Planned Parenthood funded the research) and the IUD...

...Because China does not recognize international copyright or patent conventions, it is difficult to say with certainty whether some black-market version of the pill is currently circulating in that country and perhaps outside its borders...

...But anyone outside scholarly circles who dares dissent from the RU-486 brouhaha can expect perfunctory dismissal as a right-to-life hysteric...

...IUDs are also likely implantation-blockers (although there is some evidence they simply "dissuade" the sperm from swimming up the fallopian tube to meet the egg), and the newer IUDs release progestin as well...

...Invented in 1982, the pill has been on the market in France since September 1988...

...One friend of mine was a virgin for four of the seven straight years she was on the Pill...

...The National Organization for Women is now almost entirely an abortion-rights organization: its nonprofit litigation arm devotes itself to eliminating abortion restrictions and neutralizing abortion protesters...

...And not only because it kills the unborn, a job at which it is actually not outstandingly efficient, zapping only about 50 to 85 percent of them depending on which study you read (prostaglandin, taken in conjunction with the pill, boosts the rate to 95 percent...

...For a woman whose period is late, using RU-486 means no waiting, no walking past picket lines at abortion clinics, and no feet up in stirrups for surgery," burbles health writer Laura Fraser...

...With the Pill, it was predicted that unpleasant symptoms would taper off as women's bodies got used to being perpetually synthetically pregnant...

...N ow that the Supreme Court has decided to allow states to restrict abortion substantially at hospitals and medical clinics, interest among members of the women's movement has rekindled in do-it-yourself abortion, a fad of the early 1970s bra-burning days that fell into disuse...

...How's that again...

...Rather ominously, rabbit studies reveal that RU-486 can cause birth defects, Lancet reported in 1987...

...In 1987 Baulieu bragged that RU-486 would completely replace surgical abortions up through the first ten weeks of pregnancy, which is when 80 percent of abortions take place...

...It typically takes from eight to ten years to obtain the federal Food and Drug Administration's approval for a new drug (stages of animal and human studies plus layers of review), and the cost of testing and marketing a new drug can range from $30 million to $70 million...

...The IUD engendered a similar fad a few years later, although most women I knew had their IUDs removed after a short time because of the pain and heavy menstrual bleeding they seemed to cause...

...The Network is taking a schizophrenic line on the abortion pill...

...It also means she will never have to know whether she had actually been pregnant...

...Accompanying the release of both kinds of products was a Sexual Revolution-fueled euphoria that created intense public demand...

...RU-486 "probably represents a technical advance in an area where none is needed, or at least not very much," said Dr...

...million women took the Pill...

...As many as 90,000 wearers may have been injured...

...woman does need to have access to a health clinic," admits Bass of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project...

...Although Baulieu, with typical hyperbole, has boasted that the pill will soon be available over the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 counter in drugstores for home dosing, it is being administered in France only under strict hospital-like supervision in the presence of a doctor...

...Indeed, someone who wishes to predict a possible scenario for the abortion pill might do well to read such books as Paul Vaughan's The Pill on Trial, Morton Mintz's At Any Cost Corporate Greed...

...The Health and Human Services Department currently forbids the National Institutes of Health from funding abortion research as part of its $8 million contraceptive program...

...But "safe," in the definition of Marie Bass of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, means "there's been no evidence so far of mortality...

...RU-486 is currently the sole property of its French developer, RousselUclaf, a joint subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Hoechst and the French government...

...pharmaceutical company willing to take on the U.S...

...research on contraceptives, has recently been paying for U.S...

...Nausea and vomiting are other common side effects: so, in some women, 17 SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB, CHANNEL 3, CHATTANOOGA, TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WITS, 92.3 FM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WGCL, 1370 AM, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA WAJI, 951 FM, FORT WAYNE, INDIANA CENTRAL OFFICE, BOX 62, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 47402 TELEPHONE 812 332 7251 Pro, 'ic-Yina the Best Radio and Television Service 18 for reasons no one can figure out, are itching and burning sensations around the vagina...

...All tests of the Pill uncovered a laundry list of them: weight gain, depression, anemia, thrombosis, jaundice, nausea, skin disorders, and migraine headaches were only a few...

...On July 23, Congresswomen Patricia Schroeder and Olympia Snowe introduced a $77 million "birth-control research" bill that is drafted broadly enough to include abortifacient research...

...The early histories of the two biggest fertility-control disasters, the first-generation birth control pills and the Dalkon Shield, bear a striking resemblance to the story so far of RU-486...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 the Planned Parenthood Federation of America...

...It is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower: trying to stop the process is like trying to stop a tulip bulb from sprouting...

...So far, all the studies have concluded that RU-486 is "safe...

...From 1960 through 1970, 20 Anyone outside scholarly circles who dares dissent from the RU-486 brouhaha can expect perfunctory dismissal as a right-to-life hysteric...

...Some members of the health profes- sion have expressed reservations about the abortion pill, most notably Sue Halpern, a researcher at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, in an April 1987 article in Ms...

...Phillip G. Stubblefield, president of the National Abortion Federation, at a reproductive health conference in 1986...

...No one has researched the longterm effects of RU-486 on a woman's health or fertility...

...Enthusiasts for both contraceptives pooh-poohed the reported side effects as female hysteria...

...Many women may even see the dead fetus they have expelled, a sight the surgical-abortion industry typically spares them...

...At the Population Council's IUD conference in 1962, the individual complaints of women played second fiddle to the general goal of 20 defusing what was viewed as the incipient worldwide population explosion (it was the decade of Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb...

...It is most effective taken about a week after a woman misses her menstrual period up through that seventh week, when it is markedly less effective...

...But the main reason for the hesitancy on RU-486 is undoubtedly fear of liability exposure...

...Thus, a woman who used RU-486 to have an abortion would have to make three trips to the clinic past those picket lines: an initial visit for medical screening (anemics and those with previous pregnancy problems are eliminated) and to take the pill, a second trip forty-eight hours later for the prostaglandin, administered either via injection or vaginal suppository, and a third trip a week later to make sure she has completely aborted...

...Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the French physician who developed the RU-486 molecule for Roussel, announced his invention, the drug has gone through several violent transmogrifications of description, leading one to wonder just how much anyone really knows about it...

...Under the law as it then existed, IUDs as medical "devices," not "drugs," did not require any testing before marketing...

...China also had a brief licensing arrangement with Roussel to use RU-486 as part of its one-child-perCharlotte Low Allen THE MYSTERIES OF RU-486 The abortion pill is caught in the government's regulatory machinery, but population-control groups and feminists are increasing their efforts to shake it loose...

...We do not know whether RU-486 will be as disastrous as some of the earlier fertility control methods released to unblinking, uncritical cheers from educated people who should have known better...

...The The egg and sperm will never meet: the pregnant woman will magically become un-pregnant by swallowing a pill...

...Experimental IUDs tested from the 1920s to the '50s engendered persistent reports of pain, bleeding, infection, and sterility (all had silk tails that tended to "wick" bacteria into the womb, a failing of the multi-filamented Dalkon Shield tail...

...Pill fever was the hallmark of my own college years during the 1960s...

...Poor women—Baltimore blacks who visited inventor Hugh Davis's clinic at Johns Hopkins University's medical school—were the Shield's test subjects...

...The newer generation of pills contain little synthetic estrogen and low levels of progestin, blocking implantation but not ovulation...

...In 1976, Congress amended the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act to require pre-market testing of medical devices such as contraceptives...

...The much-touted April 9 march in Washington was originally supposed to consolidate support for a variety of issues that are considered to be of central importance to women, including parental leave, government funding for child care, equal pay for work of "comparable" worth so that single mothers can earn family wages, and forcing errant fathers to support their offspring...

...It also could put the government into the RU-486 business, which would please feminists dismayed at what they view as pusillanimity in the private-sector drug industry...

...A 1969 study by the FDA showed that women were 4.4 times as likely to have the embolisms if they used the Pill...

...The FDA approved the first pill, Enovid, in 1960, after only about four years of testing, mostly on Puerto Rican slum women...

...Stopping the reproductive process (or "controlling fertility," to borrow the phrase du jour of the women's movement) is unimaginably hard, yet we want to believe that science will someday, somehow make it easy, like waving a fairy godmother's wand...

...Then they found that it quickly causes a phenomenon called "dysynchrony," in which a woman's ovulatory and menstrual cycles become unlinked, reducing the drug's effectiveness in terminating any pregnancy...

...government test and distribute RU-486 and even to consider forming a new abortion-oriented political party...

...Roussel reportedly has every pill marked and accounted for to make sure none slips into the black market...

...Many physicians have expressed concern over the heavy bleeding, which occurs even if the drug fails to induce an abortion...

...Certainly the Network would think it appropriate that there's more extensive testing and that it be followed closely to watch for abuses in medically under-served communities...

...Some women clearly have no trouble eventually conceiving again: the studies have reported repeaters in their programs...

...It turns out that NOW is comparing apples and oranges: the risks of legal, rigidly supervised administration of RU-486 in the West to the risks of illegal, putatively unsupervised surgical abortions in Third World countries where sanitation standards are not THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 high...

...The NOW/FFM coalition is one wheel of a strange troika whose other wheels are the Population Council and Charlotte Low Allen is a senior editor of Insight magazine...

...We will not know until a first generation of female guinea pigs—all of whom will be more than happy to volunteer for the job—has put the abortion pill through the clinical test of time...

...A similar abortion-rights march is scheduled for November 12...

...Much of NOW/FFM literature repeats claims for RU-486 that the medical profession has already dropped...

...Pro-choice advocates have always insisted that surgical abortion itself is virtually risk-free, even safer than childbirth, and it certainly takes less time than the pill, and without the side effects...

...Some abortion advocates have been asking themselves this very question...

...Currently there are only two IUDs in distribution, both manufactured by small, low-exposure companies and recommended for women in monogamous relationships whose risk for pelvic inflammatory disease is low...

...In the year since the pill, whose trade name is Mifepristone, went on the French market, the National Organization for Women and its offshoot, former NOW president Eleanor Smeal's Fund for a Feminist Majority (FFM), have been leading a campaign to find a US...

...Even girls who did not have boyfriends got Pill prescriptions...

...The early birth control pills were heavy serial mixes of synthetic estrogen and progesterone designed to mimic pregnancy, fooling the pituitary gland into stopping egg production...

...Its scare-tactic prediction: the pill "will be available in the U.S., either legally or illegally, in no more than 2-5 years...

...marketing of the pill...

...RU-486 is an anti-progesterone steroid that destroys the uterine lining, at least in most cases, starving out the already attached fetus, which dies and is expelled...

...It turns out that the drug does not work very well after the seventh week...

...Birth defects, a sure source of lawsuits, are one reason the U.S...

...NOW is trying to browbeat the pharmaceutical industry into getting involved...

...magazine...

...The ideological eggs of the feminists are going into one basket...

...The first-generation Pills got pulled from the market amid a flood of lawsuits linking it with thrombo-embolisms: blood clots in the veins that are fatal if they reach the heart...

...At seven weeks, a fetus is about three-fourths of an inch long and recognizably human...

...But the Population Council, a 37-year-old, $20 million nonprofit organization that has the backing of the Rockefeller and Mellon foundations and currently subsidizes most U.S...

...Part of the reason for the drug industry's cold feet is probably fear of a massive boycott by the rightto-life movement of all the drug company's other products...

...Abortion via the pill is an ordeal for the women involved, far more of an ordeal than conventional surgical abortion...

...About 4.5 million Dalkon Shields were distributed in eighty countries during the 1970s, about 2.9 million of them in the United States, before thousands of women started reporting pregnancies and miscarriages, uterine wall perforations, and infection-induced sterility...

...Indeed, timing is of the essence with RU-486...

...Why do they want to make women the guinea pigs for a product which medical science knows almost nothing about...

...They seem determined to push RU-486 through, with the goal of speeding FDA review to four years (by using European tests in lieu of American ones), limiting damage exposure for any private company that decides to make the drug, and even using federal funds to pay the research and marketing costs...

...couple population-halving program but has reportedly terminated the arrangement...