Why a French Firm Is Scared by America : Abortion politics locks promising medicine out of U.S.
It is a pathetic spectacle: In the richest nation on earth, with the best medical care available, women and men may be dying because the Bush Administration’s dogmatic stance on abortion has caused a fearful foreign pharmaceutical manufacturer to hold a promising drug off of the American market.
The French-made steroid, RU-486, has shown hopeful results in treating some forms of cancer, Cushing’s Syndrome and other serious diseases. In one test, RU-486 reduced tumors in one of every five patients with advanced breast cancer that had not responded to chemotherapy.
RU-486 is also an abortifacient. Therein lies the problem. Developed in the mid-1980s, the pill may be a safe and humane alternative to surgical abortion. RU-486 is currently approved as an abortifacient in France; 65,000 French women have used it with no adverse effects. Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands are expected to approve it for this use.
ABORTION POLITICS: But not the United States. In 1989, with no evidence of smuggling or abuse of this drug, the FDA caved to pressure from anti-abortion groups by putting RU-486 on a short list of “import alert” drugs that cannot be brought into this country for personal use. Technically, researchers could apply for a license to import the drug for testing, but the alert--and fears of a product boycott--so frightened Roussel-Uclaf, the pharmaceutical manufacturer, that it will not make supplies available for FDA-approved research projects.
Despite the fact that abortion is still legal in this country, although increasingly restricted in many states, the Bush Administration obviously prefers to hold hostage the 44,000 American women who die of breast cancer each year to the basest abortion politics. And the Administration would also clearly prefer that American women who lawfully choose to terminate a pregnancy expose themselves needlessly to surgical risks when a safer alternative may already be available. Washington’s reasoning, that RU-486 could make abortion less painful--and therefore too easy--defies the reality that for most women, abortion is, and will remain, an emotionally painful experience.
NEW CAMPAIGN: As a result, American politicians are now reduced to begging the federal government and Roussel-Uclaf for FDA-sponsored clinical trials. Earlier this month, New York City Mayor David Dinkins, no stranger to the urban tragedies spawned by unwanted pregnancies, launched a letter-writing campaign. He called upon President Bush and Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan to lift the import alert on RU-486 and let it be tested like any other drug. Dinkins also wrote to the president of Roussel, asking him to permit the export and testing of RU-486 and not “allow a small minority to frustrate the large majority.” Finally, Dinkins called on 33 other mayors around the country to join him. Included in this group are the mayors of Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Diego and San Francisco.
Dinkins is not the first to step forward on this issue. Delegations of feminists and leading American scientists and physicians have met with Roussel executives in Paris to allay their fears of a product boycott and plead with them to supply the drug.
Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) recently introduced a bill that would rescind the FDA’s import alert, which would put RU-486 on the same status as other test drugs, allowing it to be approved or rejected for use here on the basis of its scientifically proven therapeutic value, rather than political judgments about abortion.
The 480 American women who will tomorrow discover that they have breast cancer, and the 4,400 women who will tomorow undergo a surgical abortion, must wonder how long they must wait for a compassionate signal from the White House and courage from Paris.
