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...will it reach the taker? Its proponents, especially those hoping to make the clinic protesters vanish, agree that France's tightly controlled distribution method was devised, as a New England Journal of Medicine editorial put it, "for political rather than scientific reasons." One common yet radical suggestion is that RU 486 and prostaglandin could be sold to women as prescription drugs and taken at home. "To even suggest that you could do that is ridiculous," protests Judie Brown, president of the American Life League. That sentiment finds some support even from Baulieu. He opposes distribution by prescription because of what...
...emotional fortitude to go through an experience on her own, and that she will get to a hospital if she becomes one of the rare cases where there is excess bleeding or other complications. Lynne Randall, director of an Atlanta abortion clinic that has volunteered to be an RU 486 test site, sees no long-term obstacle: "The supervision would be a doctor's saying, 'I'm on call. If you get bad cramps, call me and I'll meet you in my office or at the hospital...
Randall and other would-be pioneers are also making a scientific assumption: that if a woman takes the first set of pills but neglects the second, and her pregnancy comes to term, the child will be normal. For years RU 486 opponents have warned of Thalidomide-like tragedies, "the absence of hands, a foot grown out of a knee," as one spokesman put it. Baulieu and other informed advocates argue that this is chemically impossible; that in the handful of known cases where RU 486 did not stop pregnancy, the children born were all healthy...
...process could be as simple as Baulieu and Randall suggest, private physicians, who have shunted off the majority of abortions on clinics, might be willing to perform them again. "I think a lot more private physicians would quietly give RU 486 in their practices," says Susan Hill, head of the National Women's Health Network. "It wouldn't happen overnight, but if they felt it was safe and they weren't going to be protested every day, I think they would start offering it to their patients . . . It's a lot easier to protest 400 clinics than 10,000 doctors...
...says Joseph Scheidler, author of Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion. "We will probably know which physicians are dispensing it," he warns. "We'll send in women to ask for RU 486 . . . There will be doctors who will not deal with it." For those who do, "we'll go to their homes, to their offices, to their hospitals." Bonnie Quirke, president of the Illinois Right to Life Federation, promises "a massive educational effort with physicians and pharmacists...