Stop the Politics, Let’s Get Scientific

Roussel-Uclaf, the French manufacturer of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, announced last week that it will begin a large-scale study of the pill’s potency in treating breast cancer next year.

Good news for the 140,000 American women who each year discover that they have breast cancer? Good news especially for the 42,000 expected to die of it each year?

Sadly, no, because the study will be conducted in Canada, using Canadian women. At least two American research centers asked the French pharmaceutical firm to participate in the breast cancer study but their requests were denied.

Why? Because, according to a Roussel-Uclaf official, the company was shocked by the Bush Administration’s “gag rule” barring counselors in federally financed family planning clinics from discussing abortion with clients. Roussel-Uclaf says it is simply unable to understand what the United States “is doing on the abortion issue” and as a result, the company fears that any entry into this country--for research or marketing--could trigger boycotts from anti-abortion forces.

RU-486 appears to be a safer and less painful alternative to surgical abortions. The pill is approved for such use in Britain and France. The drug has also shown great promise in treating some cancers, including breast cancer, and Cushing’s syndrome and other serious diseases.

But testing of RU-486 in this country ceased in 1989 because the Bush Administration’s Food and Drug Administration imposed an unwarranted “import alert” on the drug under pressure by the anti-abortion right. This ban--which forbids only the importation of small personal quantities of the drug and not legitimate scientific research--has so frightened the drug’s manufacturer that it refuses to make supplies available for bona fide research projects.

So, let’s assume that the Canadian study confirms the results of earlier research, namely, that RU-486 can effectively treat some advanced breast tumors that had not responded to chemotherapy. What then? Will the Administration shamefully continue to block testing of RU-486 here out of fear that testing may encourage its eventual use as an abortifacient--and thereby implicitly encourage abortions by making them safer and less painful?

We support legislation pending in Congress that would compel the FDA to lift its chilling import alert. But the FDA, which has failed to produce a shred of evidence to justify the ban, can lift the ban on its own initiative. It should do so at once. Or it should have to answer to every American woman who has advanced breast cancer.