Word: using
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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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...
Short of throwing away that cell phone or ignoring health issues altogether, how should concerned consumers use these icons of 21st century life? In England a blue-ribbon panel of experts last summer called for "a precautionary approach" that includes discouraging children from making nonessential calls and using headsets to keep radiation away from the brain. The bottom line? "Don't use a mobile phone more than you have to," says physicist Lawrence Challis, vice chairman of the British group. "If there is a choice, use a landline phone. If you do have to use a mobile phone, you should...
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...
...complete the abortion or to stop heavy bleeding. "All this says is that physicians prescribing this should be good doctors," says Dr. Wendy Chavkin, an ob-gyn at Columbia School of Public Health. In 1998, when the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation polled family practitioners about their interest in using mifepristone once it was approved and available, 45% of doctors responding said they were "very" or "somewhat" likely to use it--even though only 3% of them had performed surgical abortions...
...logistical and legal hurdles, there are the moral and psychological ones. Doctors who don't do abortions on principle are not likely to change their mind based on the method. Those who approve of abortion under certain circumstances will still want to see how mifepristone works, how widespread its use becomes and whether a backlash could endanger their entire practice. Dr. Thomas Purdon, president-elect of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, spoke with a lot of his colleagues last week after the news broke and found them both receptive and cautious. "The medical abortion is less traumatic...