The effort to import the French abortion pill, RU-486, to the United States has bogged down in a swamp of lawsuits and counter-suits which may delay the pill’s US release more than a year, advocates admitted recently. Litigation began after the pill’s chief US proponent, the New York-based Population Council, was revealed to have retained a convicted forger and disbarred lawyer to head up the project.
The Council, which in the past has helped to develop and promote such questionable abortifacients as the Norplant system and the IUD, entered into a partnership with Joseph Pike, a self-described “entrepreneur” from San Diego, to find US investors to fund and secretly manufacture RU-486. Such secrecy was necessary, abortion proponents claimed, because of the possibility of harassment from the US pro-life movement, although representatives of pro-life groups suspect RU-486 supporters of a much more practical motivation.
“I think an examination of the record suggests that fear of lawsuits from angry women, more than fear of pro-lifers, is what motivates the RU-486 supporters,” said Anne DeLong, spokeswoman for Human Life International. “After all, Population Council is the group which brought us Norplant. In retrospect, wouldn’t Wyeth-Ayerst [Norplant’s US manufacturer] have liked its involvement to have been kept secret?”
Women who claim injury from the Norplant system have been estimated to have filed more than 50,000 lawsuits against the Philadelphia-based firm, which is a division of the giant American Home Products conglomerate.
Pike and the Population Council have been sued by one segment of investors in the RU-486 manufacture project who allege varying degrees of financial misrepresentation and mismanagement. The Population Council has, in turn, sued Pike in an attempt to force him to relinquish control of NeoGen Investors, the company Pike established to obtain the licenses to manufacturer and distribute RU-486.
“Unless Pike is expeditiously removed… another weapon with which to attack the project will be furnished to its ideological opponents,” the Population Council lamented in court papers filed in New York on 4 November.
But Pike has reportedly refused to bow out gracefully from the project. Through a spokesman he has denied concealing his criminal past from the Population Council during project discussions, and he readily admits that he surrendered his North Carolina law license in May after conviction of forgery in a failed real-estate deal. Four other Neogen investors have reportedly filed affidavits in support of Pike’s continued leadership at NeoGen.
NeoGen has raised a reported $28 million dollars, of which $14 million has allegedly been found. Profits from the manufacturer and sale of the pill in the United States have been estimated as high as $100 million annually.
Representatives from the US Food and Drug Administration, which has been generally seen as friendly to RU-486 under the Clinton Administration, have refrained from commenting on the lawsuits, even though they involve the same manufacturing and distribution issues about the drug in the United States over which the FDA previously exposed concerns.
RU-486 supporters admit that the effort has hit a snag but confidently assert their eventual victory, criminal leadership or no. “So it will take a little longer than we had hoped,” said Gloria Feldt, president of PPFA, “the desire and demand are definitely out there.” (Source: reports from various wire services.)
Thailand’s grim harvest
One of the earliest countries to embark — with generous US assistance — on a full-blooded population control program was Thailand. Thirty-five years later, its demographic profile resembles that of the dying West, with villages bereft of children, schools closing down for lack of students, and a rapidly aging population. The average Thai mother today has 2.1 children, below the replacement level of 2.2, and the birth rate continues to fall.
Many in Thailand are now having second thoughts. Tiang Phadthaisong, a researcher from Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand, believes that “the family planning program has been too successful.” Tiang recently published a paper called “The collapse of Thai society: the impact of family planning,” in which she details the demographic disaster awaiting the Thai people. End family planning policies, she urges the government, so that the birth rates can once again rise to replacement levels.
Editor’s note: Even if the Thai government ended its population control program tomorrow; there is no guarantee that birth rates, now running at around 1.9 children per women, would return to healthy levels. The experience of Europe suggests that, once an anti-natalist mentality has taken hold, no amount of government largess is sufficient to induce people to become parents.
