Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008
Once controversial pill quietly changing abortion experience
RU-486 now used in 14 percent of U.S. procedures
By Rob Stein
THE WA****NGTON POST
January 22, 2008
WA****NGTON – Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court's landmark Roe v.
Wade decision, a pill that has largely faded from the rancorous public
debate over abortion has slowly and quietly begun to transform the
experience of ending a pregnancy in the United States.
On the market since 2000, the French abortion pill RU-486 has become an
increasingly common alternative, making abortion less clinical and more
private.
At a time when the overall number of abortions has been declining
steadily,
a new survey re****ted that abortions using RU-486 have been rising by 22
percent a year. They now account for 14 percent of the total – and more
than one in five of abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.
The pill, often called “miffy” after its chemical name mifepristone and
brand name Mifeprex, also has helped slow the decline in abortion
providers, as more physicians who previously did not perform the procedure
discreetly start to prescribe the pill. Other doctors have begun to offer
mifepristone in addition to surgical abortion.
“The impact and the promise is huge,” said Beth Jordan, medical director
of
the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. “It's going a long
way towards normalizing abortion.”
When the Food and Drug Administration approved mifepristone in 2000, some
predicted it would revolutionize the abortion experience and debate by
enabling women to get an abortion from any doctor, neutralizing one of
opponents' most potent strategies – picketing abortion clinics.
“The thinking initially was that this was going to change everything.
There
was a lot of hype. That didn't pan out,” said Carole Joffe, a professor of
sociology at the University of California Davis. “But the impact has been
happening gradually as it slowly and steadily is becoming integrated into
the medical system.”
More than 840,000 U.S. women who have used mifepristone since it was
approved, according to Danco Laboratories, which sells it.
The drug ends a pregnancy by blocking the hormone progesterone. Women take
the pill in the doctor's office and then go home, where they take another
drug, misoprostol, to trigger contractions, essentially causing a
miscarriage. Women then return to the doctor within about two weeks to
make
sure the process worked.
The price of the procedures varies. Standard abortions typically cost
about
$400, and the pill can cost the same to about $100 more.
About 150,000 of the 1.2 million abortions in the United States in 2006
were done with medication, the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit
reproductive health research organization, estimated recently. More than
half of abortion providers now offer the option, a 70 percent increase
from
the first half of 2001, Guttmacher said.
“Mifepristone is clearly starting to become an im****tant part of the
abortion provision in the United States,” said Lawrence Finer, who studies
the drug at Guttmacher. “I think we'll continue to see increases.”
He noted that in some European countries, more than 60 percent of
abortions
are performed with the drug.
The increase is alarming to abortion opponents, who are expecting
thousands
to gather in Wa****ngton today to protest Roe v. Wade on its 35th
anniversary.
Randall O'Bannon of the National Right to Life Committee questioned the
drug's safety, citing a handful of re****ts of women who have died from
severe complications from bacterial infections.
Sup****ters say that it remains unclear whether the complications were
related to the drug, and that overall the method has been shown to be
extremely safe.
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