Fibre of the Brain

Abortion pill is no magic bullet

From the way people were talking about it, you'd think America had suddenly become a feminist utopia. Or at least as close to one as France has managed to get. When the FDA approved mifepristone—better known as the French abortion pill, or RU-486—for the U.S. market on Thurs., Sept. 28, after a decade of delays, pro-choice advocates around the country partied like it was finally the 21st century.

MARISA BASS/YH

"Mifepristone is as significant a technological advance for women's health as the birth-control pill was 40 years ago," Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feldt said with impressive hyperbole when the news broke. And indeed, at first glance it appeared that the newest little pill on the women's reproductive market might very well end the abortion wars as we know them, finally bringing the medical procedure into the realms of civilized society. "This way you go to a doctor, and nobody knows why you're there...it's nobody else's business," one college student told the New York Times on Fri., Sept. 29. Yet while RU-486 and The Pill are both little, white, and legal, that's where their similarities end. America may have adopted France's pill like it did its café au lait, but this country still ain't France—and its endless war over who gets to control its women's uteruses is only going to get uglier as the methods of control seemingly get easier.

It is the apparent ease of the abortion pill that is so deceptive and that has immediately gotten both sides of the debate riled up at a crucial time. Both pro-choice and anti-abortion activists see it as a way for more doctors to provide abortions and more women to gain access to them—a good thing, according to pro-choice supporters, but an evil in the eyes of their anti-abortion counterparts. "I fear that making this abortion pill widespread will make abortions more and more common, rather than more and more rare," George W. Bush, DC '68, said, apparently unmoved by the fact that countries already using RU-486 have seen no rise in the incidence of abortions.

Despite the hype, RU-486 does not even come close to being as user-friendly as The Pill. It is only effective during the first seven weeks of pregnancy, requires at least three doctor visits, and must be used in conjuction with another drug, misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and expel the fetus as in a natural miscarriage. This method of expulsion is seen as a comfort to many women, who, trial studies show, often chose the pill method because it seemed more natural. Yet, as the thousands of women who do suffer natural miscarriages could explain, miscarriages are not user-friendly either. They involve traumatic heavy bleeding, cramping, and nausea—and may sometimes end in surgery anyway. Even after a decade of abortion pill availability, French women are still twice as likely to choose a traditional surgical abortion as they are to use medication.

Of course, in France, legalized abortion lives up to its name. Getting a surgical abortion means going to a doctor or clinic, having a simple medical procedure done, and then going home. It does not mean being accused of being a murderer and risking harrassment, abuse, and outright violence before even getting in the door. This is a rather unique product of American society, and it is why some women see the abortion pill as a magic talisman that they can use to ward off bogeyman pro-lifer activists. RU-486 will make abortion private, the theory goes, and thus keep both doctor and patient under a protective shield of anonymity. But bogeymen like Randall Terry, founder of the sometimes militant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, do not disappear quite so easily—and they are not likely to allow anyone involved with abortion to disappear either. "We will expose [the pill-prescribing doctor] to the community so he'll no longer be known as a mom-and-pop doctor. He is going to be known as a baby killer," Terry promised.

Aside from the threats from anti-abortion groups, the extra-legal baggage that becoming an abortion provider involves has also given many doctors interested in the abortion pill reason to back down. Many states have imposed almost comically complex restrictions on abortion providers, requiring, for instance, that the hallways of their facility be a certain width and that their hot water run between 100 and 116 degrees, in addition to the common stipulation that abortion providers register with the state. The realization that supplying the abortion pill would require a reordering of a doctor's entire practice has driven most interested physicians to shy away from it.

The approval of mifepristone has been hailed as a great leap forward in the women's reproductive rights movement, but while it should be noted as a symbolic victory, it is far from the secret weapon that many hoped would alter the abortion struggle forever. A drug can cure a woman of an unwanted pregnancy, but it cannot cure this country of the hate and anger that run more deeply through this debate than through almost any other America has ever seen. Until anti-abortion activists concede that a woman's right to choose whether she will have a child is not equal to her having a right to murder a baby, that right to choose will dance precariously on top of a very thin tight rope—a rope that could break at any moment. And such an unlikely concession will not come any sooner in the form of a little white pill.

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