But Will It End the Abortion Debate?

Take an abortion clinic. Draw some protesters around it. Someone holding a sign with a fetus on it. Someone else, perhaps, holding a real fetus.

Add the miracle drug: the protesters disappear. So do the signs, the fetus. Why? Because the clinic, too, is gone, replaced by the privacy of thousands of anonymous doctors' offices. That, say some, is the elementary physics of RU 486.

Although the philosophical center of the abortion debate has always been the woman and what was going on in her womb, its public center was the doctor who performs abortions and what was going on in his clinic. RU 486, its adherents hope, will permit medicine to achieve what politics has made problematic: allowing the issue of abortion to be a private matter between a woman and her doctor. "You can't stop a woman from visiting a doctor," a securities analyst who follows the drug industry told the Wall Street Journal. "It becomes a private transaction. And that's the end of the abortion battle." Congressman Ron Wyden of Oregon claims that once the drug arrives, "it will no longer be possible for these extremists to target centralized locations like clinics." Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, grimly alluding to the murder earlier this year of an abortion doctor in Florida, says, "You won't know whom to kill. You won't know where to lie down."

With the arrival of RU 486 in the U.S. -- especially in a form that requires the woman merely to take pills rather than also get a shot -- the vision of some pro-choice advocates, that the drug could abort the abortion debate, will be tested. Will antiabortion activists find ways to restrict the availability of the abortion pill? And if not, will RU 486 really obviate the clinics and confound the picketers?

Jerry Falwell sits in the chancellor's office of Liberty University, his school in Lynchburg, Virginia, and describes his abhorrence of RU 486. The host of the Old Time Gospel Hour on 200 television stations, he still has the contacts and much of the clout that he enjoyed in his Moral Majority days. He compares unprotesting acceptance of the new drug to the German churches' inaction during the Holocaust: "We can't make that mistake again," he says. "Morally we will have no recourse except to do whatever is available to us."

Peg Yorkin sits in the high-tech Los Angeles office of the Feminist Majority Foundation, an organization she co-founded and into which she has poured $10 million. Her worth has been estimated at up to $100 million. The RU 486 "genie" is "out of the bottle," she says. To get it to American women, "we are prepared to do whatever we have to do."

In the middle, until recently, was the drug's producer, France's Roussel Uclaf. Its corporate parent, Germany's huge Hoechst chemical company, feared a pro-life boycott of its American products if it allowed RU 486 to be marketed in the U.S. And Yorkin threatened a pro-choice boycott if it didn't. In the face of this dilemma and some badgering by the FDA, the company did what a typically cautious multinational would: it passed its burden (or tried to, anyway) onto the shoulders of someone else, in this case the nonprofit Population Council.