New Option for Women

The Food and Drug Administration’s approval Thursday of the abortion pill known as RU-486 ends 12 long years of intimidation from anti-abortion groups bent on blocking the pill’s release. Approval is a milestone in this nation’s bitter and often violent disagreement over legalized abortion. But while the French abortion pill, which could be available to physicians within a month, will significantly change the nature of that disagreement, it will not end it.

Prescribed abroad since 1988, RU-486 has now been used by more than a million women in 13 countries as an alternative to surgical abortion. Taken within the first seven weeks of pregnancy, the pill--known by its chemical name, mifepristone, or its brand name, Mifeprex--blocks a hormone, progesterone, which is necessary for the embryo to remain implanted in the uterus.

Clinical trials here and abroad confirmed--and then confirmed again--that mifepristone is safe and effective. But RU-486 also makes abortion more accessible, generating fierce opposition from groups determined to restrict if not ban the procedure. Consequently, final FDA approval was stalled for years.

The FDA has now finally green-lighted mifepristone, wisely deleting the harsh restrictions on its use that the agency proposed some months ago in an attempt to appease abortion opponents. Approval is surely one of the most significant advances in women’s reproductive health since development of the birth control pill, making what’s legally permissible actually available.

Women seeking an abortion will no longer have to run a gauntlet of screaming protesters outside the steadily dwindling number of clinics around the country that perform the surgical procedure. Physicians will be able to prescribe the drug in the privacy of their examining rooms, free from threats and the violence that has claimed the lives of at least seven clinic doctors and nurses since 1982. These advantages can’t be overestimated.

Still, mifepristone will not end the pitched battle over abortion, and there’s no guarantee that a future U.S. Supreme Court won’t increase restrictions. But the final U.S. approval of this prescribed medication has the potential power to put the difficult private decision about abortion back where it belongs--in the hands of a woman and her doctor.