1 From a reading of the somewhat scant English-language medical literature on RU-486, the French abortion pill emerges as one of the creepiest concoctions around.
2 This is not only because it kills the unborn, a job at which it actually is not outstandingly efficient, zapping only 50% to 85% of them depending on which study you read (prostaglandin, taken in conjunction with the pill, boosts the rate to 95%).
3 By contrast, surgical abortion is 99% effective.
4 Abortion via the pill is far more of an ordeal than conventional surgical abortion.
5 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 a menstrual period, with bleeding lasting an average of 10 days), and painful (many women require analgesic shots to ease them through).
6 Nausea and vomiting are other common side effects.
7 Timing is of the essence with RU-486.
8 It is most effective taken about a week after a woman misses her menstrual period up through the seventh week of pregnancy, when it is markedly less effective.
9 That is typically about a three-week window.
10 So far, all the studies have concluded that RU-486 is 'safe.' But 'safe,' in the definition of Marie Bass of the Reproductive Health Technologies Project, means 'there's been no evidence so far of mortality.' No one has researched the long-term effects of RU-486 on a woman's health or fertility.
11 The drug seems to suppress ovulation for three to seven months after it is taken.
12 Some women clearly have no trouble eventually conceiving again: The studies have reported repeaters in their programs.
13 But there are no scientific data on this question.
14 Rather ominously, rabbit studies reveal that RU-486 can cause birth defects, Lancet, the British medical journal, reported in 1987.
15 However, Dr. Etienne-Emile Baulieu, the French physician who invented RU-486, wrote in a Science magazine article last month that the rabbit-test results could not be duplicated in rats and monkeys.
16 The drug has a three-dimensional structure similar to that of DES, the anti-miscarriage drug that has been linked to cervical and vaginal cancer in some of the daughters of the women who took it.
17 All the published studies recommend that women on whom the drug proves ineffective not carry the pregnancy to term but undergo a surgical abortion.
18 A risk of birth defects, a sure source of lawsuits, is one reason the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is steering clear of RU-486.
19 One might well ask: Why bother with this drug at all?
20 Some abortion advocates have been asking themselves this very question.
21 RU-486 'probably represents a technical advance in an area where none is needed, or at least not very much,' said Phillip Stubblefield, president of the National Abortion Federation, at a reproductive health conference in 1986.
22 Many physicians have expressed concern over the heavy bleeding, which occurs even if the drug fails to induce an abortion.
23 It typically takes from eight to 10 years to obtain the Food and Drug Administration's approval for a new drug, and the cost of testing and marketing a new drug can range from $30 million to $70 million.
24 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.
25 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. research on contraceptives, has recently been paying for U.S. studies of RU-486 on a license from its French developer, Roussel-Uclaf, a joint subsidiary of the German pharmaceutical company Hoechst and the French government.
26 In the year since the pill went on the French market, the National Organization for Women and its offshoot, former NOW President Eleanor Smeal's Fund for a Feminist Majority, have been trying to browbeat the U.S. pharmaceutical industry into getting involved. (Its scare-tactic prediction: the pill 'will be available in the U.S., either legally or illegally, in no more than 2-5 years.')
27 Following the feminist and population-control lead has been a generally bovine press.
28 A June 1988 article in Mother Jones magazine is typical of the general level of media ignorance. '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. 'It also means she will never have to know whether she had actually been pregnant.' Wrong on all counts, Miss Fraser.
29 RU-486 is being administered in France only under strict supervision in the presence of a doctor. (Roussel reportedly has every pill marked and accounted for to make sure none slips into the black market.) 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 48 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.
30 Furthermore, because timing is so critical with RU-486, she will learn, via a pelvic examination and ultrasound, not only that she is pregnant, but just how pregnant she is.
31 No doctor who fears malpractice liability would likely expose a non-pregnant patient to the risk of hemorrhaging.
32 Many women may even see the dead embryo they have expelled, a sight the surgical-abortion industry typically spares them.
33 At seven weeks, an embryo is about three-fourths of an inch long and recognizably human.
34 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 improved contraceptive devices, drugs and methods.' If this passes -- a Senate version has already been cleared for a floor vote that is likely early next year -- it would put the federal government into the contraceptive marketing business for the first time.
35 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.
36 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. (Remember the Dalkon Shield and the early birth-control pills?) 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.
37 Mrs. Allen is a senior editor of Insight magazine.
38 This article is adapted from one in the October American Spectator.

This is not only because it kills the unborn , a job at which it actually is not outstandingly efficient , zapping only 50 % to 85 % of them depending on which study you read ( prostaglandin , taken in conjunction with the pill , boosts the rate to 95 % ) .
( prostaglandin ,
What is the mechanism by which prostagladin boosts the efficiency of RU-480?\n\n\n