10/02/00 9:30 a.m.
A Revealing Pill
What RU-486 tells us about abortion.

By Midge Decter, a writer and social critic living in New York

t seems that the use of the medication mifepristone (popularly known as RU-486) combined with the prostaglandin misoprostal is the preferred form of abortion in something like 14 countries, including most of Europe, the United Kingdom, and Israel. And now at long last and after much pressure from the abortion-rights movement, the FDA has approved its importation to the United States.

According to the National Abortion Federation approximately 95 percent of women using mifepristone/misoprostal will have a complete abortion up to 49 days after the start of the last menstrual period. The other 5 percent will need a suction abortion because of excessive bleeding, or an incomplete abortion, or an ongoing pregnancy, in which even after the m/m cocktail the embryo remains viable (this last occurring in fewer than 1 percent of the cases). The way it works is, a doctor gives a woman the mifepristone pill, and if no abortion has taken place after two days, she is then given a couple of misoprostol tablets either to swallow or to insert into the vagina. Finally, somewhere between eleven and seventeen days later, a clinician determines whether she has in fact had a complete abortion. If she has not, a suction abortion will be performed. On average, she will be bleeding from nine to sixteen days, and she may also be passing blood clots of varying sizes.

Setting aside the whole issue of whether abortion is murder, the interesting question is why the procedure just described is considered by so many to be an improvement on the by now old-fashioned, ordinary dilation and curettage. Surely something requiring three visits to the doctor over a possible period of two weeks cannot be considered more convenient, or, for that matter, less painful. (The passing of blood clots, for instance, is normally a far from an easy or casual experience.) Why, then, do so many women seem to prefer this possibly protracted process of getting rid of an unwanted pregnancy to a quick and dirty procedure?

Perhaps the answer is that most of the satisfied consumers of misfepristone/misoprostal had for some reason found the prospect of a trip to the abortion clinic or the abortionist's office a particularly unpleasant one — still redolent of the old back-alley shame and scandal of bygone days. Or perhaps they simply preferred the greater privacy of aborting their pregnancies by themselves in their own homes. Whatever the reason, one thing above all distinguishes a pill from a curette: It is infinitely more abstract and immaterial. One can swallow a pill or two and no matter how much discomfort and bleeding ensues, the experience is far more that of having an unpleasant medical condition than of being witness to the unmistakable ripping out of living human tissue destined to become a baby. In other words, it can feel like something that is happening to one rather than something one is doing.

For years now, the pro-abortion party has sought to play down the eventfulness of a woman's ending her pregnancy by speaking in dulcet tones of the experience and raising high the banner of so unexceptionable a principle as "choice." But rare is the woman undergoing an abortion who will not now and then, at least for a moment and sometimes for many moments, be haunted by the thought of the baby who never was and her part in making that so. How could anyone have imagined that she would not be? All the "emanations and penumbras" in the world cannot insure her the "right" to go through this experience without some deep consequence.

And that is where RU-486 comes in. The party of abortion, who have fought for so long to bring it to the United States &#!51; and who are celebrating today — have advertised its use as a simpler and safer way to terminate a pregnancy. But in the event, it might not turn out to be either simpler or safer, as those who have studied or experienced its use must surely know. Why, then, all the urgent pressure for its adoption, and the present great sigh of happiness in the abortion community? Well, for one thing, because it will be so much easier to slip a girl or a woman a pill than to get her feet into stirrups. Because it will be so much more difficult for anti-abortion demonstrators to find the proper place in which to congregate. Because it will be so much more possible to get around the problem of parental consent. But most of all, where the pregnant girls or women themselves are concerned, it will be much more appealing to be able to set the deed in motion without having to be nearly so mindful of what one is actually doing.

The question is, if abortion is not murder and no more than a function of a woman's freedom of choice, why has there been so much pressure to perfect the means for getting through it with blinders on?