That book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics—also available on an open-source platform to make it more accessible—could not be more timely. Based on interviews with more than 80 people, including many of the key figures in scientific and political battles going back decades, the book takes readers back to the earliest days of mifepristone, when it was still known as RU-486. It also delves into the lesser-known controversies over misoprostol, which is used in tandem with mifepristone under the FDA-approved protocol for medication abortion.
The biggest surprise for Baker? “How unnecessarily long it took for the drug to gain FDA approval and how unnecessarily restrictive the FDA was.” RU-486, she notes, was invented by French researchers in the 1970s, patented in France in 1980, and approved by the French government in 1988. But it wasn’t approved in the US for another 12 years. “In their lawsuit, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine frames the narrative as: The Clinton administration rushed through approval of mifepristone very quickly,” Baker says. “In fact, it took much longer to approve mifepristone than it did to approve most drugs at the time.”
I spoke with Baker recently from her office on the Smith campus, where she heads the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mifepristone was controversial from its inception, but not because it was unsafe.
By the time the drug started going up for review by the French government in the 1980s, its effectiveness and safety were pretty well established. But the Catholic Church and Catholic groups very quickly opposed it on moral grounds, and when word got to the United States, anti-abortion groups began to organize to prevent it from coming here.
From the very beginning, the resistance to RU-486 was characterized by terroristic threats and violence. In France, opponents firebombed one movie theater and tear-gassed another. They harassed Roussel Uclaf executives and their families. They called the Jewish scientist who developed RU-486 a Nazi and accused him of turning wombs into crematoriums—things like that.
In the US, this was when extremists began threatening abortion doctors and people who worked at abortion clinics. Operation Rescue was blocking clinic entrances and terrorizing staff and patients. So the whole environment around abortion was one of fear.
The FDA used highly unusual security protocols throughout the whole review process because they were worried about bombs, threats, and terroristic acts. They didn’t reveal the names of the people involved in approving the drug, which normally they would have. All of that set the tone and contributed to why the FDA was so deliberate and conservative about how they dealt with this medication.
And now, decades later, anti-abortion groups are using the FDA’s caution to argue that this drug is unsafe.