This is an edited version of Dr. Nathanson's speech at Human Life International's Conference on Love, Life, and the Family in Houston, Texas, April 14-18, 1993.

The Clinton Administration took five major steps when it entered office, and gratuitously these steps regarding abortion were taken on the 22nd of January, which is of course the day set aside in our memory for memorializing those babies who have died in this holocaust. Clinton lifted the ban on abortion counseling by doctors in family planning clinics and the ban on providing funds for abortions in contraceptive programs overseas, as well as on abortions at U.S. military hospitals. He lifted the ban on fetal tissue research, and the ban on RU486 in this country. The abortion pill is extremely topical, an issue around which a lot of myths and legends have encrusted themselves and certainly a lot of propaganda which is absolutly incorrect, false, and misleading. I want to dissect that propoganda, and that legend, and that myth point by point.

Etienne Emile Baulieu, a Frenchman, claims to have invented the abortion pill, Ru486 and wrote a book entitled The Abortion Pill. RU stands for Rouselle Uclaf, a French company which makes the pill; the French government has about a 33% interest in the whole operation the RU people have. The RU company itself is owned by a German company called Hoechst AG. It is interesting to note that Baulieu is in a turf war with George Toich, a chemist in the Department of Endocrynology at Rouselle Uclaf, over who actually invented the drug. Another book is called RU486, the English translation of the French title is actually "The Pill that Could End the Abortion Wars and Why American Women Don't Have It," written by Lawrence Lader. Lader and I founded the National Abortion Rights Action League back in 1968-69. He is still on the pro-choice, pro-abortion side and he is in fact the man who instituted the suit against the Roman Catholic Church, claiming it should have its tax-exemption removed because the Church was involved in a political issue, namely abortion. Abortion is really not political although it may lap over into the political, but at the core it is a moral and ethical issue. Lader lost that law suit.

RU486 is very closely related to progesterone, a hormone manufactured by the woman's ovary in every menstrual cycle. When a woman becomes pregnant, it is manufactured by the ovary in very large quantities to nourish and sustain the pregnancy. If the growing baby is deprived of progesterone, the baby will be literally starved to death and it will be cast out as a miscarriage. The purpose of RU486 is to mimic that of progesterone, they are very closely linked chemically. On every cell in the prenancy, in the baby and in the placenta, and the afterbirth, there are progesterone receptors; think of them like a key in a lock. The lock is the receptor, and the progesterone is the key that fits into the lock, then it exerts its effects on the pregnancy, makes it grow. If you put a false key in the lock, something that looks like the original key but really can't open the door, then you have effectively blocked all of the receptors and the real progesterone, the real key can't get in. In effect, you are depriving the growing pregnancy of the hormone that it needs with a hormone that looks almost exactly like it, but has no action. So this is what RU486 does and it is effective up to nine weeks of pregnancy. It is given as a single tablet of 600 milligrams and 48 hours later, this pill already having acted by blocking all of the progesterone killing the baby, the woman is then given a second pill called misoprostol, which makes the uterus, the womb, contract down and squeeze out the dead baby.

The ovary manufactures the progesterone hormone normally and it does three things. It makes the lining of the womb grow so that the baby can get nourishment from that lining, all the chemicals and nutrients it needs. It keeps the muscle of the womb from contracting and forcing the baby out. The third thing progesterone does is it keeps the neck of the womb closed, the cervix, so the baby can't be forced out. RU486 produces a decline in progesterone, the net result of that is that the lining of the womb begins to shrivel up and the baby is deprived of its nutrition and oxygen and will ultimately die in 48 hours. The second action of the lack of progesterone is that the muscle will begin to contract and squeeze out this dead baby. The third action is that the cervix will open up and allow this dead baby to be miscarried. RU486 is given, 48 hours later the pill is given to contract the womb strongly and forcefully and the baby is cast out.

There has already been a study and trial test of RU486 in the United States carried out at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and reported by David Grimes. Grimes is well-known as an abortion proponent and is the head of the Abortion Surveillance Unit at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. In this study, they gave 50 pregnant women RU486; two women were given the drug before the fifth week of the pregnancy. Both of these women miscarried and the success rate of the drug was 100%. 27 women were given the drug between five weeks and six weeks, 25 miscarried, a 93% success rate. After the sixth week of pregnancy, 21 women were given the drug and 18 miscarried; the success rate of the drug was 86%. For a total of the 50 women who got the drug, 45 miscarried, a success rate of 90%. This was without the second pill to force the dead baby out. With the addition of the second pill the success rate of RU486 goes up to nearly 100%; it is extremely lethal.

A recent study was just released from the University of Edinboro ,where they used the abortion pill on a great number of women and then they surveyed these women as far as psychological concern. Every one of these women had a suction abortion before and most of them preferred the pill. The interesting thing is that after they were given the second pill, which squeezes out the baby, about 75% of these women said they did not want to go home and discharge the baby in the toilet. 75% of them said they wanted to stay in the clinic in the company of other women who were doing the same thing. That has got to tell you something important, that however you slice it, abortion is a terrible experience that no woman really wants to go through alone in pain, bleeding in her own home. They would much rather be surrounded by other women who constituted in fact a support group. That again has to say something else. They are unsure of what they are doing, the morality of it, and they need the approbation, the support of other women who are doing the same thing.

A great many claims have been made to get RU486 in the United States which do not include abortion. This is a very subtle and effective tactic to concentrate on other effects, presumably beneficial, of the administration of this drug, and they don't talk about abortion. For example, there has been a claim made that RU486 can cure breast cancer. The work which claimed that RU486 can cure breast cancer was published in an obscure, unrecognized French medical journal. Secondly, this clinical trial or investigation of the effect of this drug on breast cancer had never been reproduced. In other words, nobody else has ever been able to do any experiments which show that it cures breast cancer. In fact it didn't cure breast cancer, it did shrink briefly the original tumor in the breast, but it had no effect on all the other satellite metastasize, the breast cancer riddling the body. It did not prolong the survival of these women, it was used on terminally ill women with breast cancer, they didn't live one day past when everyone thought they would. That is very important to understand because the whole issue of breast cancer is an emotionally loaded and very explosive issue; it's as appealing as a claim that RU486 can help cure AIDS. That claim has been made also and it is absolutely false, there has not even been any work done on it but that does not stop the abortionists from claiming that it cures AIDS. There is also a claim that it will cure other varieties of cancer. The fact is there is not one shred of credible evidence for this preposterous claim. Nothing in the medical literature supports this, in fact one of the scientific papers which is cited in support of that claim doesn't even exist. RU486 does not cure breast cancer or any other kind of cancer.

There is another claim that RU486 is useful in the treatment of Cushing's disease, a rare disorder of the pituitary and adrenal glands. This is an uncommon disease and when it strikes it is very serious. The fact is that work was never followed up, it was never even promising enough to do other experiments on RU486. It really did not cure Cushing's disease and the work was supported by the RU company, I don't need to tell you there is an obvious conflict of interests here. The authors of the study reporting in the Journal of Clinical Endocrynology and Metabolism concluded this: "At this stage it thus appears that RU486 should not yet be considered as a routine alternative for treating patients with Cushing's Syndrome."

The next claim is that it is of value in treating rare brain tumors, meningiomas. Most of the work is done in France since that is where the pill was developed. I found out that the one study that was reported was in another obscure French medical journal, which is no longer being published, and that the work again was carried out by the employees of the RU company. There is not one single word about RU486 in the only article, in fact RU486 was not even used in this study, it was something close to it chemically but not actually RU486. The results with these other drugs were at best inconclusive and at worst, disappointing.

If we allow RU486 in the United States,* an unproven and untested drug, it will be following in the irresponsible tradition of pharmaceutical drug disasters such as DES, Thalidomide, oral contraceptives, and the Dalcon Shield. DES stands for diethylsilvestrol and I have personal experience with this drug which was touted as being effective in preventing miscarriage; DES was said to stop miscarriages. Two things emerged after 30 years and 15 million women using this drug, one was it did not stop miscarriages, that was proven early on. After it was discontinued in 1960 or so, in 1974 we began to see cancers of the vagina in young girls aged 12 to about 16. Author Hertz began to investigate this since it was a very rare cancer and almost unheard of in girls this young, and it turned out that the mothers of these girls had all been given DES during the pregnancy with the girl. This is what is called a transgenerational drug, it doesn't have its effects on the person who takes the drug, it has its effects on the next generation and maybe even two or three generations from now. The effect is not a simple or frivolous one, it was perhaps one of the most ferocious cancers and all of these girls had to have hysterectomies at the age of 12, 13, and 14 and about half of them died from the disease. That is the appalling story of DES, which was let into this country on the presumption that it would stop miscarriages and instead it turns out to be lethal to the next generation. Now how do we know RU486 will not do the same thing? RU486 has been tested only five years, no kind of test at all for a drug as dangerous as this one. Another example is oral contraceptives introduced in the early 60's, ten years later we found out that they cause clots in the legs which would go to the lungs and were killing a substantial number of women.

There is a problem with allowing RU486 into the country, even with the pro-abortion people saying: " Look this drug can cure cancer, brain tumors, hypertension, etc., let's let it into the country and we'll ban its use on abortion". That is all very nice except that once the Food and Drug Administratiuon approves the drug for any use in this country, it cannot disapprove it for a designated purpose, i.e. it can merely withhold approval. If the FDA allows RU486 into the U.S., it cannot and will not specifically prohibit its use for abortion. Once it’s in the country you can use it for anything, the FDA cannot prohibit its use for abortion. For example, there is a drug called Brethene which is used and specifically approved by the FDA for asthma, it will relieve the asthmatic attack. Obstetricians have found that Brethene is vey useful to stop premature labor and we use it all the time. The FDA has never approved it for this purpose but it is widely used around this country. Once the drug gets the approval of the FDA it can be used for anything. That is why this drug must be resisted, you must not yield to the blandishments of those people who want to bring it in for other reasons because it only has one purpose, and that is to produce abortion. If the pill is legalized, of the 1.6 million abortions done annually, about 50% of these abortions will be done by the pill in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. We are talking now of about 800 thousand abortions a year.

If RU486 comes into the U.S. it will make parental consent laws for abortion irrelevant and invalid. The drug would instantly find its way to the black market and it would be sold under the counter to teenagers. It will be completely abused, there will be no reliable data regarding abortions thereafter, because they will be relegated not to back alleys but the back bathrooms. If we are to have abortion, at least now we do have some figures which are reported from 39 states. We have some idea of the complication rates, the death rates, and everything else connected to abortion. If we let this pill into the country we will have no data whatsoever. The limits, or at least the potential, for abuse of the use of this pill is limitless. I can envision all kinds of horrible scenarios. And if allowed into the U.S., the government will once again place its seal of approval on abortion. If you can kill a baby with a pill, you are trivializing the value of life. You are saying, "Listen, you can get rid of this baby as easily as you can cure a headache." You are putting abortion on the same moral scale as a headache and that is another step in debasing our values, the value of human life, trivializing human life, and ultimately destroying any shred of morality we have in this country.

Recently, there is another drug called Epostane, which is being tested in Scandinavia. Epostane is a spinoff of RU486, there is also another derivative of RU486 being tested which is still unnamed. This derivative will make a pregnancy disappear, not miscarry, but actually disappear. This is obviously a very dangerous drug. Another recent event in relation to RU486 is the claim that the drug can help women with endometriosis. Endometriosis is a condition where pieces of the lining of the womb find their way outside the womb to the tubes and ovaries and destroy them. A recent article published on this said: "This would seem to limit the usefulness of RU486 for the treatment of endometriosis."

An article published in the New England Journal of Medicine indicates that Mifepristone, which is RU486, is a good morning-after pill. Again, we have no evidence of this except anecdotal evidence, that is where a few people were tested with it. Furthermore, we know nothing or very little about its transgenerational effects. We do have some reports concerning the offspring of women who took the RU486 and did not miscarry but went on to term and delivered these babies. These babies were born with serious defects in the formation of the skull.

We also have reports on two women now who have died as a result of taking RU486, both in France. One woman, on her thirteenth pregnancy, was said to be a heavy smoker although I don't know what that has to do with anything. The other death is being hushed up and we don't know anything about it. So there have been two deaths in approximately 100,000 women who have taken the pill. That is about twice the mortality rate of abortion which has a mortality rate of about one in 100,000. RU486 is about twice as dangerous as the current method of abortion.

Predictably, the AMA supports testing of this pill. The House of Delegates of the American Medical Association endorsed testing and possible use of the abortion pill in the United States. The AMA, like the American College of OB/GYN, is basically in the hands of those who promote abortion and we are facing a very determined push by the pro-abortion people to get this drug into this country. The Wall Street Journal published an article that said that among those wary of the abortion pill are the drug's manufacturers. They really don't want the drug to come to the U.S. because they are afraid of tremendous political pressure from those of us who oppose abortion in any form at all. There is no other proven function of this pill, there is no other result of taking this pill except the death of the baby. There is nothing to suggest that this pill does anything beneficial to anyone regardless of what your condition is.

I hope that you all understand what is at stake here. The American public is being deluded, it is being wooed, it is being lied to , it is being sold a bill of goods about this pill which is nothing but a killer. It must be stopped, we must resist it but it will be extremely difficult to do this. We must have the knowledge and information to stop the introduction of RU486 to this country. We don't really need to go a long way to understand the foundations to our resistance to this pill or abortion at all. We simply have to refer to the encyclical letter On the Regulation of Births, which basically says that we hold those physicians and medical personnel in the highest esteem, who in the exercise of their profession value above every human interest the superior demands of their Christian vocation. Let them persevere in promoting the discovery of solutions inspired by faith and right reason; let them strive to arouse this conviction and this respect in their associates. That and the Hippocratic Oath are the basis of everything that we should be doing as physicians and as citizens. As I say, we don't have to go a long way.

*Editor’s note: RU486 was approved in the U.S. by the Clinton Administration.