No Back-Alley Abortions
Interesting piece at NYT this morning about a new pill that would make back-alley abortions highly unlikely, if Roe were to be reversed and states started outlawing abortions again. This is good information to have when a pro-choicer refers to back-alley abortions, but I'm not sure the specter raised by this drug is much better:
Even if the court restricts or eliminates the right to an abortion, the often-raised specter of a return to back-alley abortions is not likely to be realized, said Dr. Beverly Winikoff, president of Gynuity Health Services, a nonprofit group that supports access to abortion. "The conditions that existed before 1973 were much different than what they are in 2005," she said. "We have better antibiotics now and better surgical treatments."
But no change is bigger than the advent of an inexpensive drug called misoprostol, which the federal Food and Drug Administration approved for treatment of ulcers in 1988, but which has been used in millions of self-administered abortions worldwide. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, freeing states to ban abortion, this common prescription drug, often known by the brand name Cytotec, could emerge as a cheap, relatively safe alternative to the practices that proliferated before Roe. . .
The drug causes the uterus to contract and, if the contractions are strong enough, to expel the embryo or fetus. . .
A dose sufficient to cause an abortion costs less than $2, said Dr. John K. Jain, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Southern California, who has performed limited clinical trials of abortions using misoprostol alone. He said he found that it was effective 80 to 90 percent of the time, if administered by a doctor. This is slightly lower than its effectiveness in combination with RU-486.
Misoprostol is usually used in the first trimester, but under clinical conditions, Dr. Jain and other researchers say it has been used safely and effectively in the second trimester. . .
Carrie Gordon Earll, a senior analyst of bioethics at Focus on the Family, which supports a reversal of Roe v. Wade, said the existence of new technologies like misoprostol should have no bearing on the law.
"The law operates as a teacher in a moral sense," regardless of people's opportunity to break it, she said. "Even if you have some people who get a drug off the black market and sell it to women, that doesn't mean we don't have a policy to discourage abortion."
