OSV STORY FOR AUGUST 18

RU-486:Easy for the pro-life movement to swallow?

Widespread use of abortifacient 'birth control' paved the French abortion pill's way to the United States

By Russell Shaw

The anticipated approval of the abortifacient drug RU-486 for use in the United States will mark a serious defeat for the pro-life cause. But what is the real nature of this setback?

To a great extent, the defeat operates at the psychological and political levels. It hurts pro-life morale and advertises the movement's inability to influence the policy of a pro-abortion administration.

Whether it will lead to more abortions is not known, although that is a distinct possibility.

Morally speaking, however, this particular battle may have been lost a long time ago -- through widespread acceptance, even by many pro-lifers, of "contraceptives" that act as abortifacients.

From a moral perspective, it can be argued, approving RU-486 reaffirms an already existing state of affairs.

No benefit to baby

RU-486, otherwise known as mifepristone, appeared certain of approval by the Food and Drug Administration following a series of votes July 19 by the FDA's Reproductive Health Advisory Committee.

FDA Commissioner David Kessler is an advocate of introducing the drug into this country.

The advisory committee voted 6-0, with two abstentions, that the benefits of the drug "outweighed its risks"; 7-0 with one abstention that it was safe; and 6-2 that French data were "sufficient" to warrant its approval.

In this country, RU-486 would be available for use by women in the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

Pro-life groups reacted angrily to the votes. "How can President Clinton claim to want abortion to be rare when he is directly to blame for pushing forward this drug combination, which is deadly to unborn children and dangerous to their mothers?" said Wanda Franz, president of the National Right to Life Committee.

The votes by the FDA advisory committee marked the all-but-final stage in a 10-year struggle between pro-life and pro-abortion forces over whether the drug would be admitted to the United States. The battle began when reports from France first told of its appearance there.

RU-486 was developed by the French firm Roussel-Uclaf, a subsidiary of the German firm Hoechst Marion Roussel.

The drug is an "antiprogestin" that terminates pregnancy by suppressing the hormone progesterone. It is used in conjunction with a prostaglandin, Cytotec, that brings about the expulsion of the human embryo.

RU-486 abortions require two or more visits to a doctor's office several days apart. Surgical abortion is needed in 4 to 5 percent of cases because the drug does not work.

At the initiative of the FDA, U.S. trials of the drug were authorized two years ago under auspices of the Population Council, a New York nonprofit group.

The Population Council has turned over the U.S. license to market RU-486 to a for-profit group called Advances in Health Technology, which was founded late last year.

Testimony before the votes by the FDA advisory committee indicated that, despite claims of its safety, the drug is not risk-free.

At least 26 of 2,121 women participating in the U.S. tests required hospitalization for complications. Thirty-two suffered such heavy bleeding that surgical intervention was required. The Population Council reported that the rate of surgical interventions to stop bleeding was in the 1-to- 2-percent range.

The National Right to Life Committee said that, in the future, this would mean 10,000 women a year in the United States needing surgical interventions to stop bleeding after RU-486 abortions, assuming that the total number of U.S. abortions remains about 1.5 million annually and that, as in France, one-third of all abortions are performed by RU-486.

The hearing also was told of 21 babies -- three with birth defects -- who were born after their mothers had tried unsuccessfully to have abortions by taking the drug.

Dr. MaryJo O'Sullivan, a member of the FDA advisory committee and director of obstetrics at the University of Miami Medical School, abstained from voting on the drug's benefits.

"If you're talking about the woman," she said, "it may be beneficial to her, but it's of no benefit to the baby whatsoever."

Pro-lifers fear that introducing the drug into the United States will lead to more abortions. Whether or not it does, it seems likely to increase the number of physicians who do abortions, since some unwilling to perform surgical abortions are expected to perform them using RU-486.

But whatever impact the drug has over the years, the way to its acceptance has been paved by the acceptance of other chemical and mechanical abortifacients.

That clearly is so with two drugs already legal for other uses in the United States that researchers two years ago announced could be used to bring about abortion in more or less the same manner as RU-486.

It also is true of the so-called morning-after pill -- high doses of ordinary oral contraceptives following intercourse, taken with the intention of ending pregnancy at the start.

Moreover, it has been known for a long time that some forms of contraception are abortifacient in some circumstances.

Moral equivalent

In "Preventing Pregnancy, Protecting Health: A New Look at Birth Control Choices in the United States" -- published in 1991 by Planned Parenthood's research arm -- authors Susan Harlap, Kathryn Kost and Jacqueline Darroch Forest said that intrauterine devices, combined oral contraceptives, progestin-only pills and injections and contraceptive implants "inhibit implantation should fertilization occur."

In other words, these "contraceptives" actually operate as abortifacients very early in the developmental process that begins with conception.

In "Living a Christian Life," the second volume of his comprehensive work on moral theology "The Way of the Lord Jesus," the American moral theologian Germain Grisez says the deliberate prescription or use of "possibly abortifacient 'contraceptives' " is the moral equivalent of abortion.

That is so, he argues, because "the conceptus [product of conception] should be considered a person," and someone willing to terminate this life by using a possible abortifacient has "a conditional intention to kill an innocent person."

In his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae ("The Gospel of Life"), Pope John Paul II rejected the idea that abortion is acceptable very early in pregnancy.

Quoting the 1974 "Declaration on Procured Abortion," issued by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith ("right from fertilization the adventure of a human life begins"), Pope John Paul wrote:

"What is at stake is so important that, from the standpoint of moral obligation, the mere probability that a human person is involved would suffice to justify an absolutely clear prohibition of any intervention aimed at killing a human embryo. . . .

"The result of human procreation, from the first moment of its existence, must be guaranteed that unconditional respect which is morally due to the human being" (Evangelium Vitae, no. 60).

To maintain its own sometimes fragile unity, however, the pro-life movement generally has avoided opposing contraceptives, including those known to be abortifacients.

Thus, the movement has been living for a long time with a moral tension -- early abortion under the guise of contraception.

Introducing RU-486 will only increase these tensions in the pro-life movement.

Shaw is Our Sunday Visitor's Washington correspondent and director of public information for the Knights of Columbus

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor; from the 8/11/96 edition

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