Word: french
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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...
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...
When France changed direction during the mid-1980s and turned many of its nationalized industries back to private hands, no one should have felt more pleased than Maurice Allais, France's most eminent economist. During the country's postwar reconstruction, when French economists of nearly every stripe endorsed nationalization, Allais took exception. Still, he became an influential contrarian voice in the making of France's industrial policy, arguing that even state-run monopolies are most efficient when they set prices and allocate resources according to market forces...
...spectacle of the Great Depression. "In 1933 I was in the U.S., which was then a graveyard of factories," he says. "I needed to understand why." After distinguishing himself as an economics student at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Mines in Paris, Allais worked for seven years in the French mine administration and in 1944 became a professor at his alma mater...