Abortion Pill

WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused yesterday, by a 7-2 vote, to allow the first abortion-by-pill in this country, rejecting a California woman's request for legal permission to take a dose of "RU-486."In the court's first-ever comment on legal issues surrounding the highly controversial French-made pill, a majority cast doubt on the opening round of court challenges to the government ban that keeps the abortion pill from being brought to the United States, even for individual use.The ruling was at least a temporary medical setback for Leona Benten, an unemployed social worker from Berkeley, Calif.

WASHINGTON -- The Food and Drug Administration has scheduled an unusual workshop May 11 to look into the deaths of four California women who had taken RU-486, the abortion pill. Scientists and public health experts will meet in Atlanta to develop a plan for investigating the causes of the four deaths and detecting any other cases, according to a Federal Register notice to be published today. The FDA, which has updated the warnings on RU-486 in response to the deaths, is convening the workshop with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the notice said.

FOR REASONS that have nothing to do with abortion, the French abortion pill, RU486, has been hailed as nothing less than a wonder drug. Evidence is strong that it can combat harmproduced by hormones implicated in breast and brain cancer, diabetes, glaucoma, hypertension and Cushing's syndrome. It may have application to treatment for AIDS. So it's idiotic, if not criminal, to put it off limits to American researchers.The Food and Drug Administration issued an "import alert" against the drug last year on the grounds that it's a health hazard.

ANOTHER point of view, this one from the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times:"It seems no small coincidence that a trial involving the murder of an abortion doctor is in the news at the same time that clinical tests of RU-486, the so-called abortion pill, are getting under way."The national controversy over abortion is now in a new stage; clearly the battle for the hearts and minds of Americans on this question has shifted its ground. The constitutional arguments that once preoccupied courts have receded, and the major political parties are largely sidestepping the issue.

Touching yet another emotional nerve surrounding the question of when life begins, Maryland legislators began contemplating a bill yesterday that would allow pharmacists to dispense emergency contraception without a prescription. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Sharon M. Grosfeld, a Montgomery County Democrat, would give pharmacists the ability to provide women with what's known as the morning-after pill, or Plan B, a higher dose of the hormones found in typical birth control drugs. Supporters, including a variety of women's rights groups, say the legislation would prevent unintended pregnancies by allowing women the chance to get the pill when it is most effective - within hours after sexual intercourse.

New studies show that RU-486, the French abortion pill, i also effective as a morning-after pill. That raises the stakes for opponents of legalized abortion who are committed to keeping the drug out of this country. It also pushes the larger abortion debate ever closer to a debate about contraception, a subject most Americans considered settled long ago. Marylanders should watch these developments as they ponder Question 6, the abortion law that appears on the November ballot.Some background: RU-486 works not by preventing the fertilization of an egg, but rather by preventing a fertilized egg from implanting itself within the uterus so that a pregnancy can develop.

With the resounding approval of Maryland's abortion law, state voters have helped re-shape the national landscape for the abortion debate. And with the election of a Democratic president committed to abortion rights, as well as an larger contingent of pro-choice legislators in Congress, Americans have shown that they value reproductive freedom and will vote to protect it.Question 6 was one of only two abortion ballot questions facing voters on Tuesday....

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton has created high expections for the first 100 days of his administration, a period that in previous presidencies has been marked at the beginning by the high hopes of Inauguration Day but that often ends in frustration.What he has said he will do"I think it's important to elect a president . . . who will send programs [to] the Congress in the first hundred days to deal with the critical issues that America is crying out for leadership on: jobs, incomes, the health care crisis, the need to control the economy.

Constancy of purpose has not been a strength of the Clinton presidency. But the administration deserves great credit for the patient and persistent negotiations that led to the announcement this week of an agreement to make the French pill RU-486 available in this country. RU-486 has become known as the "abortion pill" because it can end a pregnancy within seven weeks of conception without a surgical procedure.Roussel Uclaf, the French firm that makes the drug, has shown no interest in marketing the drug in the U.S., largely because of threat from abortion opponents to boycott the firm's other products.

WORLD Iraqi insurgents targeted U.S. and Iraqi troops launched a joint operation yesterday in an area west of Baghdad used to rig car bombs, while American soldiers rounded up 33 suspected insurgents in a sweep of southern parts of the capital. pg 10a 1st partial face transplant Doctors in France said they had performed the world's first partial face transplant, forging into a risky medical frontier with their operation on a woman disfigured by a dog bite. pg 10a MARYLAND Overtime costs could double Baltimore is on pace to spend twice as much on employee overtime as planned, largely because of expanded police work.