About-Face Over

When a French pharmaceutical firm announced last week that it was suspending distribution of an abortion pill because of worldwide boycott threats by right-to-life forces, the action touched off an international furor. Prochoice advocates promptly labeled the ban on the pill, called RU 486, a blow to women's rights. More than 1,000 physicians attending a meeting in Rio de Janeiro signed petitions urging that the company, Roussel Uclaf, reinstate the pill. The outcry apparently worked. By week's end, under an unprecedented order from French Minister of Health Claude Evin, the drug company, which is partly owned by the government, abruptly reversed its decision.

RU 486 was approved by French health officials in September, and is manufactured under the trade name Mifepristone. Administered within the first five weeks of pregnancy, it causes abortions by blocking the action of the hormone progesterone, thus provoking the uterine lining to slough off the embryo. If taken with a prostaglandin, a substance that makes the uterus contract, RU 486 is about 95% effective. Some 8,000 women have used the pill, which has been available only in hospitals and medical clinics and has no harmful side effects.

Family planners have hailed RU 486 as a safer, less expensive way to end unwanted pregnancies, but right-to-life groups fear that it could make abortions commonplace. Roussel officials say that much of the protest against the pill came from U.S. abortion foes like Dr. John Willke, president of the U.S. National Right to Life Committee. Willke charges that RU 486 can cause birth defects if it fails to induce an abortion. "It may be a chemical time bomb," he asserts.

Nonsense, says Dr. Annie Bureau, a French birth-control expert: "This product constitutes both scientific progress and an advantage for women." Faye Wattleton, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who deplored Roussel's decision to drop RU 486 as "a tragic display of cowardice," called the company's about-face "the right decision for the women of France and, indeed, for women all over the world."