The U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally approved the abortion-inducing drug RU-486 after more than 12 years of battles between pro- and anti-abortion forces. Unfortunately while they approved it, the FDA attached unnecessary restrictions to the drug that will make obtaining the drug a hassle for womyn.
According to the Associated Press, the drug, originally developed in France, blocks a hormone, progesterone, which in turn causes the lining of the uterine wall to thin resulting in a spontaneous abortion. The drug is more than 90 percent effect in causing an abortion if taken within 49 days of the beginning of a woman’s last menstrual period.
In a bizarre, though not unexpected move, the FDA placed numerous restrictions on RU486 approving it only for distribution by doctors who, according to the Associated Press, “can operate in case a surgical abortion is needed to finish the job or in cases of severe bleeding – or to doctors who have made advance arrangements for a surgeon to provide such care to their patients.”
This is ridiculous. Should surgeons who perform back surgery be the only medical professionals able to dispense medication for back pain? Millions of people see non-surgeons for heart and other ailments, which might later call for surgery without needing to find a doctor, who himself, is a surgeon.
President-elect George W. Bush opposes abortion; his father’s administration banned RU-486 from this country in 1989. Many people think that Bush’s selection for Attorney General, John Ashcroft, would ban birth control pills and IUDs, deny emergency contraception of a woman who’s been raped and force a girl, pregnant from incest, to bear a child, even at the risk of her health.
What did the Clinton-Gore administration do for the past seven years, while the FDA stood around and dragged its feet on a drug approval that should have been extraordinarily routine? Absolutely nothing.
They apparently didn’t try to dissuade the FDA from the needless conditions they attached to the drug.
-Source: FDA approves abortion pill. The Associated Press, September 28, 2000.
