The predators of Planned Parenthood

INTREP - SOCIOLOGY - FAMILIES

Wow. Just damn. Malkin floored me with this one. This was a powerful column, and I'm forwarding it to some of the pro-infanticide acquaintances of mine.

This Teenwire website sounds absolutely deporable. I first heard of it in Tammy Bruce's book, and it sounded obscene there--but Malkin brings to life the true evil.

God help these abortion-mongers if they ever try to get near my daughter through her school, or in any other way.

BUMP

To me, the solution is already solved: If we can`t force them out, we`ll breed them out. Let liberals and their followers continue to get abortions.

The baby, however, is neither liberal nor conservative. Just a baby.

This Planned Parenthood website offers enormous potential for legal action by children or their estates injured/killed in abortions.

I would also point out the lack of FDA (or ANY) warnings on RU-486. Children are absolutely given no informed consent education regarding the potential side-effects of the chemical and surgical abortion procedures touted by this seductive and very dangerous advertisement website.

Given the fact that schools can't dispense an asprin to a student without parental consent, but an organization like PP can perform surgical procedures without it, I've wondered what might happen if a minor were to get a procedure done at PP without parental consent, and the parents were to sue to have PP designated as the legal custodian of the minor, and try to force PP to pay for all costs involved in raising the child, up till the age of 18.

I guess I know that it will never happen, since I doubt that you can sue an organization for this sort of thing, but I think that it would make a strong statement... If a group like PP wants to take over the parenting role, they can damn well pay for it!

Mark

Children are absolutely given no informed consent education regarding the potential side-effects of the chemical and surgical abortion procedures touted by this seductive and very dangerous advertisement website.

Don't forget that a minor can not, by law, even give concent, informed or otherwise. That's the major flaw in this crap that's going on with having abortions for minors without parental consent.

Mark

The abortion industry has managed to get some exceptions for informed consent laws for children. The political power is amazing isn't it?

Teenwire.com's readers are advised by Planned Parenthood legal experts to call a free hotline number for confidential pregnancy tests and private abortion counseling. Responding to a 14-year-old girl nicknamed "devilchik" who writes a letter asking the experts if she can get an abortion without her mom's permission, the Planned Parenthood advisers supply a list of state laws regarding parental notification and consent. California, where Holly died, has no parental involvement requirement. In a section titled "Yikes!" the experts enthusiastically explain the "judicial bypass" process for circumventing parents altogether when a teen wants to take RU-486 in secret.

OMG!!

bttt

Malkin ping!

Pro-life ping!

In 2001, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates received $161,986,202 in Federal funding.

Your tax dollars at work.

Michael M. Bates: My Side of the Swamp

Would you put me on your ping list--?

I am particularly interested in online lists of PP donors--after the success in Austin of slowing down construction of an abortion clinic by applying economic pressure to businessmen not to build it, the next step is exposing the donors and applying similar tactics.

The trouble is, PP's tax returns allow them to put "anonymous" in the donor slot on the 990 that require them to list sources of income. They think that'll keep the world from knowing who pays to run the abortion mills.

But that'll only work for so long--there's a way around the "anonymous" veil.

Just as long as the government schools don't recruit them to the dark side. Otherwise, the ghouls don't need to breed. They'll just steal our children.

There is? What is it?

Malkin ping!

WooHoo!!! Pictures

Just an expression of faith and persistence. A road that goes south/north...also goes north/south. There's more than one way to skin a google.

see reply above--talking to myself again!

Michelle
Malkin
Growl!

Post here to the thread if you'd like to be on the Michelle Malkin list.

STOPP Planned Parenthood

btt

God, I hate Planned Parenthood. Check your FReepMails, pal.

"Planned Parenthood" - federally funded murder. This country has gone down so far it's unbelievable. I believe that Michelle Malkin is becoming the spokeswoman for America, but Washington won't listen.

I smell a FReep opportunity.

LOL, can you imagine hundreds of pro-lifers invading their message boards?

Not that I'm suggesting that of course ;-)

A must read!

webmaster for teenwire.com

It's about time Planned Parenthood got a name which relects it's purpose and values...

MURDER, Inc.!

Planned Barrenhood PING

The good news is there are Pro-Life sites for teens. www.GravityTeen.com and www.RockForLife.org are two of the best.

Please let me know if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
- H.G. Wells (1921).

"God help these abortion-mongers if they ever try to get near my daughter through her school, or in any other way."

If your daughter is above th third grade, I'll bet they already have. How much do you know about what goes on daily in classrooms? FIND OUT EVERYTHING!

RADIO FREE REPUBLIC ON NOW, 5PM PACIFIC 8PM EASTERN

JEFF GANNON'S WASHINGTON WITH SPECIAL GUEST SEN. CORNYN, R-TX

LISTEN LIVE

CHAT

This woman has become one of my favorites. She's so incisive and on the money.

"The abortion industry has managed to get some exceptions for informed consent laws for children. The political power is amazing isn't it?"

It truly is, and it shows how deeply devoted to killing a large swath of our elites are, or I should say remain.

Margaret Sanger might have been avant-garde in her advocacy of birth control, but in her devotion to euthanasia and the elimination of "undesirables" I don't think she was so cutting edge.

This is the sin of utilitarianism.

My daughter is in third grade, and I know for a fact they haven't yet begun this crap. The teacher knows I won't stand for it. The worst thing in her school is the creeping environmentalism, but so far it's just of a "clean water and air are good" kind, with which I agree.

Luckily, we live in a small, conservative rural town in Minnesota, where--amazingly--the school still uses the term "Christmas" break, not "winter" break. We're not too PC out here in the sticks.

I reccommend becoming personal friends with her teacher.

Margaret Sanger was an absolute flaming racist, who encouraged abortion for the express purpose in eliminating the inferior black race and other undesirable (in her sick evil mind) minorities.

It is laughable to see how the leftists tell her story, like reading old Soviet propaganda describing the kindness of Stalin.

Say the angels of death: CHOICE ON EARTH

(earth, as in right to the grave!)

....We can only win this fight on our knees!

Thanks for the ping!

Thanks for the ping. Good article by Michelle.

bttt

If your daughter is above the third grade, I'll bet they already have. How much do you know about what goes on daily in classrooms? FIND OUT EVERYTHING!>>

Yes, the UN and Secular Humanists, Socialists and Satanists have made huge inroads in America's School System.

She also was anti-Catholic and she certainly devised a way to eliminate those large Irish and Italian families.

The saga of RU-486

Lawrence Lader, head of the underground organization that supplies RU-486. "We are the only game in town," he says.

By Aaron Zitner,
Boston Globe Staff
November 22, 1997

Just a few years ago, RU-486, the "French abortion pill," was hailed as a drug that would irrevocably alter one of the bitterest battles of our time by making abortions easier and less traumatic. Since then, it has quietly slipped into limbo.

Fed up with a Republican White House and its conservative policies, a tiny band of radicals set out five years ago to turn a Westchester, New York, warehouse into an underground drug lab. Unbeknown to the landlord, the group installed chemistry equipment, sinks, and a fume hood. It hired a garbage collector to remove chemical waste, using a made-up corporate name to ensure secrecy. If questioned, its members agreed to say that they were working on a new treatment for cancer.

The ARM Research Council was not out to produce cocaine or a new designer hallucinogen but something far more controversial and consequential to the health of the nation. It planned to make RU-486.

RU-486, commonly called the French abortion pill, is potentially the most important development in the American abortion debate since Roe v. Wade. By replacing surgeons and sedatives with pills and water, it can take millions of abortions out of the clinics, which have become the target of protests and violence, and move them where the antiabortion movement cannot follow: into private bedrooms and the offices of ordinary doctors. With RU-486, ending a pregnancy can be nearly as private as starting one.

Equally important, RU-486 means an end to the waiting many women face once they decide to have an abortion. Test kits available in any drugstore allow a woman to learn whether she is pregnant as early as the second week after conception, but doctors often will not perform a traditional abortion until the sixth week. With RU-486, a woman can end her pregnancy right away, before the embryo develops human features. For many women, that means the abortion will carry less emotional trauma.

Women in France and China have been using RU-486 for a decade; it has been available in Britain and Sweden for years. In those four countries, more than 400,000 women have had abortions using RU-486. But 17 years after its creation, the drug is still not sold in the United States.
Nor is there a guarantee that it will ever find its way into US pharmacies - or even that it will remain available in the countries that have it now.

The company that invented the pill, giant Hoechst AG of Germany, recently closed its manufacturing plant amid pressure from antiabortion groups, leaving European women to draw on an inventory that will last no more than two years.

In the United States, a nonprofit group is trying to set up production, backed by millions of dollars in financing and unprecedented support from President Clinton and the Food and Drug Administration. Yet its four-year effort has been mired in lawsuits and finger-pointing, and the group now declines to say when the pill might arrive on US shelves.

The result: Today, not a single company anywhere in the free world is making RU-486 - except for tiny ART or Abortion Rights Mobilization. Thanks to its covert manufacturing plan, designed to operate beneath the radar of watchful antiabortion groups, ARM is now supplying small amounts of RU-486 to a network of 10 clinics, none of them in Massachusetts. This allows about 150 women each month, or 1,800 a year, to avoid surgery and instead have what doctors call a ``medical abortion.''

That is small consolation for RU-486 supporters, who say that one-third of US women who have abortions, or about 500,000 a year, would choose the pill. Although none of the 10 clinics that offer the drug is turning people away, the small size of the network means RU-486 is not an option for most women. And Lawrence Lader, the 78-year-old, New York-based writer who leads ARM, points out: ``We are the only game in town.''

Like a storm locked in a closet, RU-486 has been pushed into a kind of limbo, its power to affect one of the most divisive battles of our times neutralized. But the familiar protests and boycott threats of the American abortion wars are only one of the causes. The forces stopping RU-486 include some surprises - business economics, liability law, and plain old-fashioned greed - and they are so powerful that not even a sympathetic US government has overcome them. How ARM, with no pharmaceutical experience and little financing, succeeded in producing RU-486 where more powerful groups have failed says much about the debate over abortion today.

Ever since Ancient Egyptian times, women have looked for something - a drug, a collection of herbs, a set of physical movements - to end a pregnancy easily and without surgery. So when the French drug company Groupe Roussel Uclaf announced in 1982 that it had created an abortion pill, it caused an immediate sensation.

It is unclear if Roussel had been looking for a way to induce abortions; later on, company officials said they had been searching for cancer-fighting drugs. But sifting through hundreds of compounds to understand their effect on the endocrine system, Roussel scientists were drawn to one with unusual characteristics, which carried the lab identifying tag RU-486.

For a pregnancy to succeed, a woman's body must produce a heightened amount of the hormone progesterone, which prepares the uterine lining so that a fertilized egg can implant itself and grow in the uterus. Progesterone also helps develop the placenta, which nourishes the growing embryo.

The uterus receives progesterone through special receptors, but RU-486, as it came to be known, binds itself to those receiving cells and blocks the hormone. Deprived of the progesterone it needs, the uterine lining sloughs away, taking the embryo with it. In essence, RU-486 causes a miscarriage.

Many researchers and health agencies were immediately enthusiastic about the drug, which was given the scientific name mifepristone. It seemed to offer a safe way to end pregnancies, which could be especially helpful in developing countries, where a shortage of doctors and sanitary facilities makes abortion dangerous. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that 20 million abortions are performed illegally or unsafely each year worldwide, causing 100,000 or more deaths. Because using RU-486 is fairly simple and requires no surgery, some researchers believed it could save women's lives.

By 1987, a series of trials showed a success rate of 95 percent for RU-486 when used in tandem with a second drug. There were some limitations: As in a miscarriage, the drug caused some pain. It induced heavy bleeding, which could continue in some measure for more than two weeks. The drug could be used only in the early stages of pregnancy; today, doctors prescribe it through only the eighth or ninth week. And while a traditional abortion commonly requires a single trip to a doctor, RU-486 required two or even three so that the woman could be sure she had expelled the embryo from her body. But RU-486 seemed effective, and it could be used early in a pregnancy, when abortions are safest. Studies showed that many women preferred it over other methods.

Soon, the very reasons that abortion-rights advocates saw RU-486 as so promising - its ease, its privacy, its effectiveness so early in a pregnancy - became alarms for the antiabortion movement. To them, RU-486 was the ``French death pill,'' a form of chemical war on the unborn. And members of the movement let Roussel know how strongly they felt.

In 1988, shortly after Roussel asked the French government for permission to sell the pill in France, protesters began regular gatherings outside the company's Paris headquarters. In February, the US-based National Right to Life Council warned that any company marketing an abortion pill in the United States would face a boycott of all its products, not just those related to abortion. Angry letters poured in to the office of Roussel president Edouard Sakiz, who had also participated in the early studies of RU-486. Some said he would pay for ``assassinating'' babies.

Even more pressure came from Roussel's parent, Hoechst AG, a company with unusual political sensitivities. Hoechst, which owned 56 percent of Roussel stock and now owns it all, traced its corporate history to IG Farben, the manufacturer of Zyklon-B, used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Zyklon-B had been called the ``human pesticide.'' Now, critics were attaching the same disquieting label to RU-486.

Moroever, Hoechst chairman Wolfgang Hilger was a devout Roman Catholic, and the church was strongly critical of RU-486. Not only were French bishops protesting the drug, but the Vatican newspaper, in an editorial thought to represent the views of Pope John Paul II, eventually attacked it as the ``pill of Cain: the monster that cynically kills its brothers.'' If religious groups, antiabortion groups, and - most threatening of all - Catholic hospitals followed through on a boycott, $30 billion in annual Hoechst sales would be under attack, including $6 billion in the United States.

In time, even some Roussel scientists who had created RU-486 conceded that they could not market the drug in the face of such opposition. And so on October 26, 1988, Roussel shocked France by announcing that it would abandon the drug. It would not sell an abortion pill after all.

The outcry from feminists and reproductive-health specialists was immediate, and it sparked another remarkable event. Only 48 hours after Roussel's dramatic announcement, the French government ordered Roussel to bring RU-486 to market. RU-486, declared Health Minister Claude Evin, was the ``moral property of women, not just the drug company.'' If Roussel resisted, it might lose its patent and have to watch another company sell the drug. In a second turnabout, the company immediately restored its plans to bring the pill to France.

From that point on, RU-486 no longer belonged entirely to Hoechst and Roussel. As antiabortion groups, abortion-rights supporters, and governments laid claim to the drug, it became clear that the company alone would not decide whether the product it created would ever be sold.
`It was a failed condom,'' says the woman, an addictions counselor and mother of four. ``I only slept with my partner that one time. There's no way I could financially support another child, and this would also mess up my law school, that I worked so hard to get into.'' Classes start in just a few weeks.

She is sitting on an examination table at the South Avenue OB-GYN Group, in Rochester, New York, one of the 10 clinics that receive RU-486 from Abortion Rights Mobilization. It is a cramped place, tucked in the back of a community hospital. A poster on the door displays the choices available in birth control pills. A Georgia O'Keeffe print and a houseplant do little to mask the sterility of the white walls. The only warmth comes from the voices of the staff, who manage to sound both straightforward and comforting.

It takes only a short time here to see why antiabortion groups are working so hard to stop RU-486 - and why abortion-rights advocates want it so badly.

Mary, as we agree to call her, has just used RU-486, and she is still ragged from the experience. Three days ago, she came to the clinic and took the pill, ending the life of her growing embryo. Two nights later, Mary took four other pills, containing misoprostol, a drug that forced her uterus to contract and push out the embryo. It had been a night of cramping, bleeding, and trips to the bathroom, similar to a miscarriage. ``It was tough being all alone at night,'' she says. For support, she called her sister in Rhode Island.

Today, she is back at the clinic to make sure she has expelled all the ``products of conception,'' as the embryo and placenta are called at the clinic. And she is adamant that the pill was the best way to have an abortion.

To begin with, she did not have to face the vacuum-aspiration machine, used in the most common abortion method. Mary had such an abortion years ago, she says, and ``hated it. I don't like the sound of the machine. It feels like you're getting the life sucked out of you.''

With the pill, she also was able to have the abortion as soon as the drugstore test kit showed she was pregnant and before the embryo developed the head and arms that give it human form. That allowed her to feel less troubled about the procedure. Some women see RU-486 not as killing a baby but, as a patient named Kim, a 40-year-old bank branch manager, puts it, ``more like ending a chemical reaction in your body.''

``I knew what I was doing was wrong, but I think it gets worse, the longer you wait,'' says another Rochester patient, a 34-year-old mother of two. ``I'm probably going to pay for it with God. But I felt better about the route I had gone, because of the earliness.''

Abortion with less emotion: It is a prospect that leaves antiabortion activists horrified. They fear that women will not have time to contemplate the consequences before taking the pill. They worry that abortion will become too easy.

``I think we may initially see an increase in the total number of abortions,'' says Christopher Slattery, director of the Manhattan-based Legal Center for the Defense of Life. ``There's a chance women will see this as an easier, less expensive, and less physically traumatic abortion, and may be attracted to it.''

Indeed, according to a review of 12 surveys published in the journal Family Planning Perspectives, 60 to 70 percent of women choose a medical abortion over surgical abortion when given the choice.

Antiabortion groups also fear that the relative ease of administering RU-486 could encourage more doctors to offer abortion. That would reverse the current trend: Between 1988 and 1992, the number of abortion providers fell 8 percent, the Alan Guttmacher Institute reports. About 84 percent of all US counties have no abortion service at all.

``I'm worried that we're going to turn more health-care practitioners into killers,'' Slattery says. ``Any time you turn the heart and soul of an individual, it's hard to get them back. They're doing the devil's work, and it's going to be hard to win them to the cause of life.''

In Rochester, the South Avenue OB-GYN Group's survey of women taking the pill shows mostly, but not uniformly, positive reactions. The clinic asks its patients: What would you tell another woman about taking the pill?
``Painless, no emotional trauma. Had surgical before.''
``Be prepared for cramping and bleeding.'' ``Scared - woke up in a pool of blood.''
``It is a very personal alternative. Can go on with daily life. No one else needs to know.''

By 1992, 10 years after it announced the existence of RU-486, Roussel had ended its effort to push the pill into new markets. It was selling the abortion pill in France, Britain, and Sweden. The Chinese had made their own version of the drug and began providing it in China in 1988.
But Roussel had no intention of bringing it to other countries - especially not to the United States. Not only were the Reagan and Bush administrations hostile to RU-486, but the American abortion wars, full of protests and boycott threats, had created a quicksand that might swallow any company daring to take a step.

That all changed in 1993, when Bill Clinton took office. After intense lobbying from Clinton's FDA, Hoechst agreed to help put RU-486 in US pharmacies. But the company would have no connection to the drug. Instead, it would donate the US rights for RU-486 to the Population Council, a nonprofit research agency that had sponsored US trials of the drug in the 1980s.

The decision was considered a major breakthrough. An American group finally had the patent for RU-486. Supporters of the pill predicted that it would be available by 1995. But an obstacle course lay ahead.

For 45 years, the Population Council has been a major player in the field of reproductive health. It conducts biomedical research, studies population trends, and analyzes family-planning programs, with a heavy focus on the Third World. From its offices in midtown Manhattan, it supervises a budget of $49 million and a staff of 360 in 20 countries.

The council has also developed new forms of contraception, including several types of IUDs. But it is not a pharmaceutical company. It licenses those products to other companies to manufacture and distribute.

Now, with RU-486, the council would have to find a manufacturer to produce a drug, a ``tableter'' to turn it into pills, a distributor to get it to pharmacists and doctors - as well as investors to bankroll the whole plan. Moreover, the council and the FDA had agreed there would be clinical trials with American women. The FDA had clearly signaled that it would give RU-486 quick consideration, but there were data to gather and reports to compile.

On top of it all, the council aimed to do most of its work in secret, to shield investors and partners from antiabortion protests. With the 1993 shooting of Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider, outside his Florida clinic, the abortion wars were turning from bitter to violent. In a few months, John Salvi would shoot sevline, killing two. ``The antiabortion pressure includes the fear of violence, not just politics,'' says Sandra Waldman, of the Population Council. Even if they want to develop RU-486, investors and businesses want to minimize risk, she says, and ``they don't like threats of violence.''

With the RU-486 patent in hand, the council began looking for a partner to supervise the work that had to be done to make and sell the pill. More than a dozen groups wanted in. The one the council chose was a disaster.

It was led by a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur named Joseph Pike, who ran a family of companies under the name Neogen. Pike and the council already knew each other. Since 1988, the council had licensed a group that included Pike to manufacture its Copper-T intrauterine device.

Now, Pike was awarded the rights to RU-486. His job was to find a manufacturer and tableter, and to raise as much as $27.5 million from investors to cover costs. He would set a price for the drug and come up with a brand name. His goal was not only to give American women the drug but to turn a profit for the investors and pay royalties to the Population Council. To avoid scaring potential investors, none of his work would be made public.

Pike had already raised $14 million when the problems began. In March of last year, the council learned that he had resigned from the North Carolina bar over a forgery charge that stemmed from a 1985 real estate deal. The news completely changed the council's view of Pike, and council officials decided they could no longer work with him. If Pike stayed with the RU-486 project, ``it will be much more difficult, and perhaps impossible, to raise the additional funds that are still needed to fund the project,'' the council said in legal papers, ``and another weapon with which to attack the project will be furnished to its ideological opponents.''

Yet Pike would not leave right away. According to Leslie Sebastian, his spokeswoman, Pike wanted to make sure the company was left with adequate financing and leadership, because investors and business partners might sue him if it failed. ``He was the one legally on the hook, because he had raised all the money for it,'' Sebastian says. ``He had put all the contracts together. He is still exposed to this day.''

As the council tried to remove Pike, work on much of the RU-486 project stalled for nearly a year. It took a lawsuit to force Pike to give up control of Neogen and to sell most of his stake. When the suit was settled, in February 1997, the council thought the project was back on track. It predicted that RU-486 would arrive on pharmacy shelves by the end of this year.

But there was more bad news to come. On February 28, two weeks after the Pike suit was settled, the Population Council lost the manufacturer Pike had hired to produce RU-486. No one will say why the company, a Hungarian firm called Gedeon Richter, backed out of the project, but, months later, no replacement has been announced. The council declines to comment on rumors that Neogen has been negotiating with an Indian manufacturer.

Nor will the council say who has taken control of Neogen, now called Advances/The Neogen Group, which under new management continues to hold the license to make and sell RU-486. But those people are identified in Sebastian's lawsuit. The suit names Medapproach L.P., a Tennessee-based partnership, as the general partner of Neogen, and W. Brad Daniel as the owner of Medapproach. Brian Freeman, a New Jersey investor, is chairman of the board. Daniel declined to comment, and Freeman did not return phone calls.

Amid the turmoil, the RU-486 project has spawned at least seven lawsuits, including two by investors and potential investors against Pike, and one by Pike against potential investors. Sebastian is suing both Pike and Neogen's new owners for nonpayment of wages, even though she still works with Pike on new business ventures. Much about the RU-486 project has been turning not on women's health but on investments made largely by men.

Lawrence Lader is smirking. The chain-smoking, silver-haired head of Abortion Rights Mobilization, the group behind ARM Research, says he has offered to help the Population Council time and again, only to be rebuffed. ``They are in deep trouble and don't know how to get out,'' he says. ``It astounds us. We tried to help, but they're not easy people.''

As Lader talks about RU-486 and his 30 years in the abortion-rights movement, he seems driven by a mix of altruism and ego. In several of his books on abortion, Lader himself is the main character.

He has ample right to place himself there. A Harvard graduate (class of 1941) and former magazine journalist, Lader published a survey of abortion practices in 1966, when the subject was still in the shadows of the culture. The book is cited eight times in the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision.

The book prompted women to contact him for help, leading Lader to set up an illegal and underground abortion referral service. In 1969, activists gathered in his apartment to plan the first meeting of the National Abortion Rights Action League, which would push for new abortion laws. When NARAL grew large, he left it to start a faster-moving, more confrontational group that became Abortion Rights Mobilization.

By 1992, ART like other feminist groups, was frustrated that Hoechst had refused to bring RU-486 to the United States. Lader wanted to goad the company into changing its mind: If he could show that someone else knew how to make RU-486 in the world's most profitable market, maybe Hoechst would enter the market itself.

Under a little-known law, lawyers for Abortion Rights Mobilization had determined, the group was free to copy the drug for research purposes. As long as it did not sell RU-486 for profit, the group could even distribute it to women as part of research trials. Lader's plan was to make the drug but not to become a large-scale supplier. His goal was to pressure Roussel to fill that role.

To make his own copy, Lader enlisted David Horne, a steroid specialist with the chemistry department at Columbia University, who agreed to work for free. To minimize unwanted attention, ARM created an entity to sign contracts and pay bills. It was called the ARM Research Council - a name that does not include the word ``abortion.''

Horne was not starting from scratch. The Roussel patent for RU-486 was public, and drug patents include information about manufacturing. ``The problem is that companies often don't publish the best way to produce the drug in the patents,'' Horne says. ``So one has to go through the process oneself and check it out and see what problems develop.''

To do that required a lab. Lader says he asked several universities for lab space, but they were all too nervous. The group was forced to build its own, in the warehouse near Westchester. Over the course of six months, Horne and two full-time lab workers hired by ARM refined the manufacturing process laid out by Roussel. To get the purest product, they tinkered with the amount of solvent in each reaction, and the temperature, and the time that chemicals were allowed to react. Because producing mifepristone is a 10- or 11-step process, problems had to be solved several times over.

To date, Lader says, ARM has spent about $600,000 making RU-486, compared to the $14 million that Pike raised before he left the Population Council project. But by April 1993, ARM had something unique in the United States: a copy of the abortion pill.

There was a chance that Lader's work could have been for naught. By the time he produced his copy of RU-486, American politics had undergone a sea change. Bill Clinton was in office, and he had ordered the FDA to push Hoechst to bring the pill to the United States. Lader's work, designed to pressure Hoechst in its own way, seemed unneeded. And yet four years later, the Population Council has still not produced a pill. ARM's version is still the only one in sight.

Today, Hoechst has cut all ties to RU-486 and stopped production of the drug. It has donated the US rights to the Population Council. It has given the rights for everywhere else in the world to another nonprofit organization, a French startup led by Edouard Sakiz, the former president of Roussel.

Now, both the Population Council and Sakiz are trying to find manufacturers. And a variety of forces have complicated the search. The big pharmaceutical firms are wary of RU-486, but industry insiders say that comes as no surprise. For years, the industry has been backing away from all types of contraception and abortion products. To begin with, the market for an abortion pill may not be that large. Even the highest estimates place annual US sales at just over $100 million. While that may seem like a lot, big pharmaceutical companies often demand far more. US consumers, for example, spent more than $11 billion on drugs to treat high blood pressure last year and more than $1.4 billion on antihistamines, according to the research firm Scott-Levin.

Another problem is liability costs, which can be high even for a safe product. When women began to sue AH Robins for the Dalkon Shield, an IUD that was found to cause infections, it not only put the manufacturer in bankruptcy but prompted ``spillover'' lawsuits against other IUD makers. As a result, G.D. Searle pulled its Cu-7 (or ``copper 7'') IUD from the market. Even though the Searle IUD was never found to be defective, it drew more than 2,000 lawsuits. ``It was completely discontinued, because of the costs of litigation, and after that the product was still endorsed by the World Health Organization, Planned Parenthood, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists,'' says company spokeswoman Claudia Kovitz.

Norplant, the contraceptive implanted in capsules under the skin, boasted $141 million in its first year of US sales. But then the manufacturer was hit with lawsuits and bad publicity, and sales dropped to $3.7 million last year.

Liability costs are a particular problem with reproductive products, because they treat people who are healthy to begin with. ``That gives you a very high burden of proof for the safety of your product,'' says Richard H. Douglas, vice president for corporate development at Genzyme Corp., in Cambridge. If sick people take a medication and suffer side effects, ``you weigh that against the fact that people might have died if they didn't take these drugs,'' Douglas says. ``It's not like that in the case of pregnancy.''

``There used to be 13 pharmaceutical companies engaged in contraceptive research. This is now down to four,'' says Margaret Catley-Carlson, the former Canadian deputy health minister, who is now president of the Population Council.

``This is not because of antiabortion boycotts or threats. When you look at the risks and benefits and profits associated with contraceptive products, you decide to go on to other product lines.''

If these forces have hurt contraceptive development, they have crippled abortion drugs. Even products that have already been created cannot find their way to market, thanks to liability concerns and protest threats. According to the Institute of Medicine, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, the European firms Organon and Schering have developed abortion-inducing drugs but have decided not to sell them, because of the ``political dimensions of the release of RU-486.''

Nor have pharmaceutical companies marketed a so-called morning-after pill, which ends a pregnancy shortly after intercourse, even though it consists of existing and common birth control pills. This year, the FDA took the unusual step of inviting makers of birth control pills to apply for permission to label them for use as a morning-after pill. But an FDA spokesman says that only one company has publicly shown interest in doing so.

One abortion drug, however, is finding its way into more US clinics. Called methotrexate, it is a cancer and arthritis treatment that also stops the cells of an embryo from dividing. For use in abortions, it is given by injection and used, like RU-486, in conjunction with a second drug that causes the uterus to expel the embryo. But RU-486 is preferable because it works more quickly, says Dr. Eric Schaff, a University of Rochester associate professor and supervisor of the RU-486 project at the South Avenue OB-GYN Group. After six days, only 65 percent of women have completed an abortion using methotrexate, while 95 percent using RU-486 are done in three days.

Despite the common obstacles they all face, there is little apparent cooperation among the groups that hold the future of RU-486. ARM has closed its lab, which could produce only a handful of pills each week, and has found a US manufacturer to continue the work. With FDA approval, it distributes the pill to clinics in Rochester, New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as in Burlington, Vermont; Germantown, Maryland; Bellevue, Nebraska; and among the groups that hold the future of RU-486. ARM has closed its lab, which could produce only a handful of pills each week, and has found a US manufacturer to continue the work. With FDA approval, it distributes the pill to clinics in Rochester, New York City, Atlanta, Dallas, San Francisco, and Seattle, as well as in Burlington, Vermont; Germantown, Maryland; Bellevue, Nebraska; and Kalispell, Montana.

Lader says he has long offered to produce pills for the Population Council, but he will not reveal the name of the ARM manufacturer. The Population Council clearly cannot accept that condition. ``We need a company that can manufacture commercial quantities and is an FDA-approved plant,'' says the council's Sandra Waldman. ``In order to do that, we have to know the company and be able to talk to the company.'' Moreover, she says, a lab producing a few thousand pills for Lader may not be able to handle the large quantities demanded by the Population Council.

Sakiz says that even if he finds a manufacturer for Europe, that company would not likely cooperate with the Population Council, for fear of jeopardizing any of its other US work.

As for the council's own efforts, Catley-Carlson says the problems are temporary. After all, the council has found a way past a series of other hurdles. ``People said, `You'll never get the patent transferred,' and we did,'' she says. Given the violent acts of John Salvi and other antiabortion figures, ``it was said to be impossible to conduct clinical trials in this country, and we did that, too.'' In addition, the council won conditional approval from the FDA that the pill is safe and effective.

But there is a chance the project may be undermined by a key element of the Population Council's plan: the secrecy.

By staying mum on key details, the council has given antiabortion groups an opportunity to raise more questions about RU-486. ``Women ought to be aware of who will manufacture the drug, who is behind it, and what the track records of those people are,'' says Gracie cq Hsu, a policy analyst with the conservative Family Research Council.

``And if something goes wrong, we should be able to hold that company accountable.''

Even some abortion-rights supporters have their doubts. ``The controversy over abortion makes everyone get weird. It makes us think we have to shield ev[eryone,'' says Marie Bass, a longtime RU-486 proponent who runs a health-policy consulting firm in Washington. ``But we have investors, and I think we had a solid base for moving forward.'' By keeping so much private, she says, the Population Council may have made it easier for a partner like Pike to sign on and harder to scrutinize what is going on in the project.

``Maybe that wasn't right,'' she says. ``Maybe we shouldn't have given over to this notion that what we are doing is such a scary, scary thing.''

Bump!

The least we can do is stop all tazpayer monies from being used to fund groups like ?planned Parenthood?.
The creeps in charge should be charged with her death and punished.

ProLife Ping!

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In 2001, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and its affiliates received $161,986,202 in Federal funding. Your tax dollars at work.

I know I'm late to this thread, but I just thought I would throw this out there too. My former employer, Bank of Oklahoma, is owned by a man named George Kaiser. Needless to say, the guy is a billionaire. Well, his wife died a couple of years ago, and all of us employees recieved a memo: Instead of sending flowers to the funeral home, he wanted us to take the money we would've spent and donate it to Planned Parenthood! Seems it was his wife's or his favorite charity! Isn't that sweet!