'Abortion Pill' Awaits New Political Treatment

(WOMENSENEWS) -- With more research, it could offer new treatments for breast cancer, fibroids and endometriosis.

But since it's an abortion drug, since it weathered a congressional investigation two years ago -- and since it's in short supply -- researchers have yet to test its full potential.

That, says Amy Allina, program director of the Washington-based National Women's Health Network, is the story on mifepristone. "This drug has the potential to make women healthier in many ways," says Allina. "But the politics surrounding it have made it difficult to secure funding for more research, and scientists are shying away from studying the drug because they fear getting research protocols approved will be difficult."

A 2006 paper in the medical journal Gynecological Endocrinology agreed, saying "association with abortion limits the clinical applications of mifepristone."

Susan Wood, former director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Office on Women's Health and now a research professor at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services in Washington, D.C., says Election Day might make a big difference.

"A new presidential administration could change the atmosphere at the National Institutes of Health, which funds medical research, and the FDA, which oversees it," says Wood, who resigned from the FDA in 2005 to protest delays in granting emergency contraceptives over-the-counter status. "A new administration has the potential to reduce the hesitancy that government and private funders might have about mifepristone."

Short Supplies

Kevin Fiscella, an associate professor at New York's University of Rochester Medical Center, says studies on mifepristone's applications beyond abortion have been limited by a shortage of the drug.

"For more than a decade, it was difficult for American researchers to get their hands on mifepristone because there wasn't a U.S. supplier," says Fiscella. "Now it's available through Danco Laboratories, a relatively small supplier that may not be able to produce quantities needed for larger studies."

Mifespristone was the subject of congressional hearings in 2006 that followed the deaths of six U.S. women and one Canadian who took it to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

All the women died of bacterial infections, and the FDA strengthened the drug's warning label to stress the risk, though it was never withdrawn for use in medical abortion.

In the two years since the hearing, authorities have not established a definitive link between those fatalities and the use of mifepristone to induce abortions, but widespread research into the drug remains sidelined by an anti-choice federal government.

More than 900,000 U.S. women and more than 2 million women in 37 other countries have used mifepristone in medical abortions, according to its New York-based manufacturer, Danco.

More than 97 percent of users surveyed would recommend the method to a friend, according to the New York-based Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Even so, the FDA has received reports of more than 950 problems (mostly hemorrhaging and infection) associated with mifepristone's use for abortions.

Higher Risk for Medical Abortion

Though only 0.016 percent of users experience these side effects, medical abortion still carries 10 times the risk of death associated with surgical abortion, according to Planned Parenthood.

Mifepristone is offered by 60 percent of U.S. abortion providers and accounts for 13 percent of all abortions and 22 percent of those before nine weeks' gestation, according to the New York-based Guttmacher Institute.

In 2006, Ohio legislators passed a measure that would restrict the drug's use for abortions and as a research subject in the state but the law was struck down by a federal court.