Word: rued
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Last Thursday, when the Food and Drug Administration approved the sale of the abortion pill mifepristone--long known as RU 486--it put fewer restrictions on its use than anyone had expected. Virtually any family doctor or ob-gyn can now prescribe the two-drug regimen, provided he or she has some surgical backup arrangement if it fails to end the pregnancy or there are side effects. No more clinics; no more waiting until pregnancy is far enough along for surgical abortion. Just a series of pills taken over a period of days to induce a miscarriage. Advocates hailed...
...Thursday night, as the debate wrapped up, eyebrows shot up in America?s conservative enclaves. Who was this guy sitting across the table from Lieberman? This guy who?s going to stand by the FDA?s approval of RU-486? Who?s actually torn over the issue of gay and lesbian marriages? And who?s preaching "tolerance and acceptance" at every turn...
...gone out, then, to ease the guidelines regulating the use of RU-486 so that the procedure can be used to the benefit of a larger percentage of the population. Their arguments are three-fold: First, that the drug is far safer than a traditional surgical procedure, given its lower rate of complications. Second, that although the cost of RU-486 is comparable to the cost of a surgical abortion, the nation's largest insurance companies (including Aetna, Inc. and Cigna Corporation), have announced their intention to incorporate the pill as part of their standard coverage. Most significantly, these staunch...
...line of reasoning that makes a great deal of sense; and yet, there is a faction of the pro-choice movement--including myself--for whom such arguments ring somewhat false. It's a contradiction of sorts: I believe in a woman's right to choose, and therefore I support RU-486 for its ability to make that decision a safer and more accessible choice. But I'm not at all comfortable with the third point, this rhetoric that the pill is a panacea of sorts. The idea of making the abortions more morally morally because they have become somewhat less...
According to a Kaiser Family Foundation survey taken this summer, one in three gynecologists who will not currently perform abortions stated that they would definitely prescribe RU-486 once it became available. This seems to me an incongruous position to take. This one-third, who in most cases could with relative ease take the time to become certified to perform surgical abortions, have consciously chosen not to do so. And yet these same physicians are more than willing to prescribe a drug that produces the same effect...