Word: weeks
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...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...
...little wonder that Al Gore brought it up every chance he got, wouldn't let it go in his chat with Larry King last week, even as George W. Bush called the FDA ruling "wrong" and promised to build a "culture of life." The next President, Gore warns, could appoint as many as four Supreme Court Justices, enough to bury Roe v. Wade forever. Just in case any swing-voting women out there are taking abortion rights for granted, Gore noted that "I support a woman's right to choose; my opponent does...
...last week's ruling said that to prescribe the drug, a doctor must be able only to date the pregnancy conclusively and, if anything goes wrong, provide surgical intervention, either to 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...
...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 and done so much earlier in a pregnancy that physicians can rationalize the fact that they are not disrupting a more advanced pregnancy," he said. "The emotional and ethical barriers are easier...
Though the abortion debate could now land squarely back in the middle of the presidential campaign, both candidates mainly used last week's announcement to reinforce longstanding positions. While the next President can't reverse the FDA outright, he could pick an FDA commissioner and a Health and Human Services Secretary who would raise safety questions and try to tighten distribution--with the goal of making medical abortion just as hard to get as surgical abortion...