Pills & Paste

"Have you got anything to help my girl out? She's in trouble."

This not uncommon appeal across a drugstore counter spawns one of the world's meanest, lowest rackets. As every druggist knows, the customer who makes this plea is interested in abortion and usually wants a box of pills (often hideously expensive). As every gynecologist knows, pills don't work--and are highly dangerous. Last week the U.S. Food & Drug Administration let it be known that it had launched a determined drive against the thriving abortion-drug trade.

Doctors estimate that one U.S. pregnancy out of every three ends in abortion. Some abortions are spontaneous (miscarriages). Some are "therapeutic" (performed to save life). But the vast majority (about 750,000 every year) are illegal. Least likely to succeed are abortions attempted by means of drugs.

Abortion drugs come in two forms: 1) pills and 2) paste. To get around the law, the pills masquerade as something else (sample label: "An aid to delayed menstruation caused by cold or exposure to inclement weather"). They generally contain ergot, quinine, apiol oil or various exotic substances, none of which, doctors say, can possibly produce abortion. But in the large quantities with which desperate patients often dose themselves, they may be fatal.

The paste, made basically of potassium iodide, iodine and soft soap, and usually administered by doctors or midwives, is more effective, but vastly more dangerous. When the paste gets into the blood stream, as it often does, it quickly kills. Introduced to. the U.S. in 1931 by a German named Adolf Schickert, the abortion paste ballooned into a $300,000 business, enough to produce some 240,000 abortions (and nobody knows how many deaths) a year, before Food & Drug sent Schickert and four other paste producers to jail. That seemed to have ended the paste racket; reports of deaths due to the paste promptly declined. But last month Food & Drug's watchful inspectors got word. of a new paste menace, worriedly set out to trace the new outbreak to its source.

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