Word: pills
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...only doctors in the big cities use it, what will really have changed? Last week's much heralded FDA decision--the denouement of years of controversy over a pill developed in France two decades ago--was not hailed as a triumph just for urban women who already have choices. Mifepristone proponents predicted that when it finally reached the market, it would privatize the whole experience of abortion, take it out of the streets and the courts and the Congress and into the privacy of the home and the doctor's office, enabling women to end a pregnancy before the embryo...
...could argue that the most important thing that happened last week was that science changed sides and put its power to work for the pro-choice team as well. The abortion pill shifts the focus from the latest stage of pregnancy to the earliest, when the entire embryo is the size of a grain of rice. For abortion-rights activists scarred by five years of fighting over "partial birth" abortions, that is where they prefer the public debate to take place...
...that only doctors who currently do surgical abortions would be allowed to prescribe mifepristone; that there might be some special certification required, or a rule that the doctor have access to an emergency room less than one hour away. All of that would have made the approval of the pill almost meaningless; abortion would still be unavailable in vast swaths of the country...
...time of the survey, the drug was still crawling through the approval process. Now that it has been cleared, the real test begins. A doctor's decision to offer the drug rests on a complex calculation. Many may read the FDA language about the pill's being limited to "physicians who can accurately determine the duration of a patient's pregnancy" to mean that they should do this with ultrasound--and most do not have ultrasound equipment in their office. Likewise, special training and extra malpractice insurance might dampen enthusiasm for offering the drug. Doctors will have the extra burden...
...women in the trials were a self-selected group. For the general population, the pill is a new option, but not an easy one. It is not likely to be less expensive than surgical abortion, given the number of doctor's visits and the possibility that the pills will sell for $200. And it is not as though you take a pill and the baby disappears. Medical abortion, as opposed to surgical, is a multistep process, requiring three visits to the doctor over a period of two weeks. The first visit is to make sure the pregnancy is still early...