Background reading:

• “Sneak Peek: What’s in the Winter Issue of Ms.? Groundbreaking Reporting on Women’s Health and Power” — Ms. Editors
• “Mifepristone as Weekly Contraceptive Performs ‘Beyond Expectations’ in Clinical Trials” — Carrie N. Baker

Transcript:

00:00:00 Michele Goodwin:

Welcome to 15 Minutes of Feminism, part of our On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine platform. As you know, we report, rebel, and we tell it just like it is. And on 15 Minutes of Feminism, we dive right in and we count the minutes in our own feminist terms. In this episode, we are giving you a very important peek at what’s taking shape in our coming magazine, which is hitting the shelves very, very soon. 

We’re talking about mifepristone. A very important drug that’s been under attack by anti-abortion foes, but what is so important is that it is a drug that is essential to health. It’s been used for decades in countries for around the world, for decades in the United States, but useful and so importantly for a variety of health needs addressing tumors, addressing fibroids, addressing so many concerns within health. It’s under attack and this is very serious for American health given how important this particular medication is in general for health and safety in that of women. 

So, I’m unpacking this with a very important scholar, Carrie N. Baker. She teaches at Smith College. She is the professor of the study of women and gender, and also chair of the program for the study of women, gender, and sexuality at Smith College. Listeners, sit back, take a close listen, and then advocate. Make sure that your lawmakers understand the importance of mifepristone for American healthcare. All right. Let’s dive right in. 

Carrie, it is such a pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for joining us and for your always important contributions to Ms. Magazine and the broader scape of literature facing so many issues that are relevant to our country that engage women, but I think that people should really come to understand what concerns women concerns the country, so. 

00:02:29 Carrie Baker:

Absolutely. 

00:02:31 Michele Goodwin:

Thank you.

00:02:32 Carrie Baker:

Great to be here. 

00:02:33 Michele Goodwin:

So, you’ve written a very, very important piece for the magazine about mifepristone and about what’s being missed with this targeting of mifepristone as only being about abortion. And you’ve made clear that that’s wrong, it’s misguided, and there’s so much more for us to learn. So, first I want to start off with you telling us a bit about what motivated you writing this piece.

00:03:00 Carrie Baker:

Yeah. So, I’ve covered mifepristone for quite a number of years, abortion pills, and for Ms. Magazine. I also wrote a book that was published in late 2024 called, Abortion Pills, U.S. History and Politics, where I looked at the history of the medication. Mifepristone was developed in 1980 in France and it took over two decades to get the FDA to approve it here in the United States because of anti-abortion folks who didn’t want people to have access to abortion pills. And it was a huge fight with the FDA. They did not want people to have access. And then, even when it was approved it was tightly restricted. 

Along the way, what we found out was that mifepristone is effective not only to end a pregnancy, but also for many other pregnancy related conditions and for conditions that are not related to pregnancy. And despite that fact and despite research showing promising results for a whole wide range of conditions, because of abortion opponents and the politics around mifepristone and its association with abortion, that research was suppressed. And so, the use of this medication for many conditions has been suppressed, sadly.

00:04:31 Michele Goodwin:

I wanted to just take a moment there because there’s so many different pieces of this that our American public are not aware of, because abortion itself, if we start there, has been framed as being incredibly dangerous, something really harmful. Something that women should avoid, it will kill them. And one of the things that your research and so much others have revealed is that is absolutely not the case, in fact, it is the opposite, right. So, the World Health Organization has said that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot. The United States Supreme Court has acknowledged that a woman is 14 times more likely to die carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion. So, if you could just set the narrative straight then about why would abortion opponents frame mifepristone as being so dangerous. Honestly. 

00:05:26 Carrie Baker:

Yeah. So, just to start, I mean, abortion pills, which are a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, which is another medication commonly used for ulcers, but can be used in combination with mifepristone to end a pregnancy. That combination of medications is safer than Tylenol. The use of them to end a pregnancy is safer than Tylenol. There are over a hundred peer-reviewed studies showing how safe they are. So, all of the propaganda around the idea that abortion is not safe is just that, it’s propaganda. 

The anti-abortion movement wants us to think that it’s unsafe because they don’t want us to have abortions. They want us to think that it’s dangerous and it’s safer to carry a pregnancy to term. That’s absolutely not true. The reason that they try to make it sound unsafe is that, you know, they want, you know, for people that don’t agree with their religious position that a fertilized egg, or embryo, or fetus is a person and that it’s killing to end an early pregnancy. They want to be able to see, well if you don’t agree with us on that, it’s dangerous to have an abortion and therefore you shouldn’t do it. And you know, it’s must easier politically to argue, oh, we care about pregnant women. We’re not trying to end women’s rights, we’re trying to protect women, and that’s why we’re trying to limit this medication.

So, really, I think it’s more…it’s just like their most recent strategy of saying we want to ban mifepristone because it’s a pollutant in our water system, which is just an absurd claim, but they’re trying to sort of exploit environmental laws to ban abortion. I mean, they really do mental gymnastics because their position is so unpopular. I mean, if the vast majority of Americans don’t agree with them on the core issue, which is banning abortion.

00:07:27 Michele Goodwin:

So, let me go back to then this core question that leads both your book, but importantly this article, which is that mifepristone serves many purposes. Abortion we hear a lot about and so you’ve made clear, I’ve written about it, that it’s safe, safer than Tylenol, penicillin. And we’re not talking about Tylenol as a dangerous drug. We’re just talking about something that people get over the counter that they use to calm even a baby’s fever that mifepristone, misoprostol taken together or on their own safer. 

So, we’ve got that straight and set, but what a lot of people may not be aware of is that there are multiple uses of these drugs and that they can be essential to healthcare. And this is a really important point because if mifepristone is taken off the market, then that means, or made more difficult to receive, this could impact other areas of health, and can you tell us about that?

00:08:32 Carrie Baker:

Absolutely. So, the FDA in 2012 approved mifepristone for Cushing’s Disease, which is a hormonal disorder, and they have granted a compassionate use exception to treat meningioma, which is a benign brain tumor. Mifepristone is also widely prescribed off label to manage miscarriages, treat ectopic pregnancies, and to support cervical dilation during childbirth and induce labor. So, all of those treatments are widely used in the United States. But what a lot of people don’t know, actually, is that mifepristone has been shown to be successfully used in quite a number of other conditions that the FDA has not approved and it is not being used here in the United States, but in some cases, is being used abroad. For instance, uterine fibroids. Mifepristone shrinks uterine fibroids and enables people to avoid hysterectomies or other kinds of surgeries. 

00:09:38 Michele Goodwin:

So, Carrie, let me just stop you right there. And I realize when we do our 15 minutes of Feminism, we always say that we count in our feminist terms, and you are dropping little pearls of magic and there’s so many women, including young women, who suffer from fibroids that keeps them in pain, can cause internal bleeding, severe discomfort. And to think that here it is, that we have a drug that’s been so deeply politicized by a group of people who are anti-abortion, who then make it very difficult for us to be able to be thoughtful, scientific, medically engaged about the issues and concerns that effect the lives of women and even girls. And so, this one issue, fibroids is incredibly important because as you say, one of the responses to women who suffer from having fibroids is, well, let’s just clean out your entire uterus. 

00:10:44 Carrie Baker:

Yes.

00:10:46 Michele Goodwin:

Let’s just give you a hysterectomy. And my gosh, I mean, it’s like cruelty from a barbaric age. 

00:10:52 Carrie Baker:

Yes, yes, absolutely, 26 million U.S. women are affected by fibroids. It often leads to invasive surgery, either removing the fibroids themselves or just performing hysterectomies. It’s a leading cause of infertility in the United States. And let me just tell you how mifepristone works that prevents the growth of fibroids. What mifepristone done is…a lot of times fibroids are fueled by progesterone, right. Progesterone causes the growth of fibroids. What mifepristone does is it blocks the receptors that absorb the progesterone. So, if you can block the absorption of progesterone the fibroids don’t grow. 

And what happened is right after the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, a group of researchers at University of Rochester between 2003 and 2011 published six peer-reviewed studies showing that mifepristone effectively treated fibroids. And I interviewed these doctors. They said that the fibroids shrunk. The bleeding stopped. The patient’s quality of life improved dramatically. They felt better. They had more energy. They had more color in their cheeks. They would go about life with a lot more enthusiasm. They actually thought it could be even a mood enhancer because the women were just happier. 

And you know, they said that because it was mifepristone, and this was under George W. Bush, the NIH didn’t renew the funding for stage 3 clinical trials and that Danco Laboratories, which produces mifepristone, didn’t have the money to fund stage 3 trials and they couldn’t get any other drug manufacturer to do it. Why? Because it was mifepristone and it was associated with abortion and they were afraid that the anti-abortion people would boycott them and terrorize them. And so, they couldn’t get the funding. And Dr. Kevin Fiscella, who’s at University of Rochester, what he told me is that any other drug they would’ve gotten instant funding. 

00:13:03 Michele Goodwin:

Oh, for sure. I mean, if this reduced tumors associated with…if this reduced men’s prostate, you know, or some effect in men’s bodies it would be over the counter. 

00:13:14 Carrie Baker:

Yes.

00:13:15 Michele Goodwin:

But if you think about it, if we pull back for just a moment and can take a learning lesson. Let’s say, erectile dysfunction medication. 

00:13:22 Carrie Baker:

Yes.

00:13:23 Michele Goodwin:

There we have a person who was running for president, Bob Dole, doing commercials about erectile dysfunction. Every state followed with a mandate that insurance providers had to make sure that erectile dysfunction medications were part of what patients would be covered for. You think about that. I mean, we’re talking about the quality of life for women, whether they can go to work, go to school, do that without pain. The risks of hysterectomy, and yet the research shut down. And yet, lack of access. And when it has come to men’s erectile dysfunction, we’ve made it a priority that every state should make sure that men can have access to erectile dysfunction medications.

00:14:15 Carrie Baker:

Absolutely. 

00:14:16 Michele Goodwin:

And you can’t make this up, Carrie. 

00:14:18 Carrie Baker:

Yeah, absolutely. I will say, researchers in other countries carry that research forward.  In China, Italy, India, Nigeria research continued and across these studies they showed that there was reduced menstrual bleeding, relieved pain, improved quality of life, and in some cases restored fertility. So, what happened is that China in 2014, their equivalent of the FDA approved mifepristone for treatment of uterine fibroids. And so, for over a decade women in China have had this relief, yet American women still do not have access to this very effective, non-surgical treatment. We are so behind and it’s just infuriating. And that’s not the only condition. It’s not just fibroids. It’s also endometriosis, breast cancer, Gulf War illness, and potentially other autoimmune diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome and multiple sclerosis. 

00:15:18 Michele Goodwin:

Carrie, if I could…I hate to interrupt you again. I love this back and forth, but you mentioned endometriosis. 

00:15:25 Carrie Baker:

Yeah.

00:15:26 Michele Goodwin:

And I was just recently on a call with someone whose daughter is American but is now studying abroad has to come back to the States. This will be her third surgery related to endometriosis. As a child, as a teenager, had been telling her parents about the pain that she was experiencing, and her dad has been on the phone with me. He’s probably going to be listening to our episode when it goes live. And he has been tearful with me saying how much he regretted that he did not take seriously how much pain she was in, how he did not understand until she began having these operations. Too late. And what you’re saying again is that here it is, there is a drug that has been researched, that has been tested around the world for decades, and where women across the world have been able to have relief from suffering in pain, but we in the United States have been captured by an anti-abortion lobby and this anti-abortion lobby has served to block in many ways the use of mifepristone for medical uses of common ailments that women and girls experience. 

00:16:54 Carrie Baker:

But I think that women’s pain is not taken seriously. I think that the idea is women should be in pain, particularly in things related to childbirth and reproduction. And it’s just not valued. That’s what it means to be a woman, to have pain, and we don’t care. And I think it’s also particularly for women of color, right. 

00:17:18 Michele Goodwin:

Oh, for sure, when you talk about fibroids. Sure. 

00:17:21 Carrie Baker:

Doctors don’t take their claims of pain seriously. And the research shows, I mean, Dorothy Roberts had the book not long ago about showing how, you know, doctors don’t take the pain of black people seriously, right. In Fatal Interventions, right, her book on Fatal Interventions. And so, I think that…

00:17:41 Michele Goodwin:

Harriet Washington’s, Medical Apartheid. Yeah. 

00:17:45 Carrie Baker:

Right. Right. And so, I think this is all part of the same thing where our lives are not valued. 

00:17:56 Michele Goodwin:

Carrie, this is how we begin the New Year and it’s right to begin the New Year level setting in this way. It is absolutely right at a time in which the words women, gender, etc. have been blocked and banned, stripped away from federal websites. This kind of erasure, treating women as if they are a case of DEI. What the heck is that. Women are more than half of the population of the United States and politically reduced to a class of a minority group. 

And here, I’m not saying that in a disparaging way, I am saying that the mental gymnastics as you’ve talked about that somehow women are incidental to this country when they are actually more than half of the population of this country. And the point that you close with, which is that there has been this long problem in the United States that is imbedded in law and society that women suffering is the norm, it’s not the exception. 

00:19:07 Carrie Baker:

Yeah. Yeah. And I do want to just quickly say that research is also showing that mifepristone can prevent breast cancer, which we have no way to prevent breast cancer. And again, this has been ignored. And it also can be used as weekly contraceptive. And Rebecca Gomperts is doing clinic trials in Europe right now. The hope is that it will be approved as a weekly contraceptive within the next two to three years with no side effects other than you don’t have a period, which for all the women being tested is a very good side effect. And so, you know, this would be a much more reliable and tolerable contraceptive than what we have so far. 

And so, the point being that researchers in the United States can’t get the funding to do this kind of research. And you know, this is a travesty and I think that we, as women in the United States, need to change that. You know, and this is what we did with mifepristone originally when we got it approved for abortion. We found the funding, we found the researchers, we created the company to bring the drug to the United States. You know, it was Ellie Smeal and Feminist Majority, and folks at NOW. They went over to the drug company in France, and you know, convinced them to bring the drug to the United States. We need to mobilize a movement to get this drug more widely tested in the United States for things like fibroids, for things like contraception, and you know, even…

00:20:47 Michele Goodwin:

For things like breast cancer, like you just said.

00:20:48 Carrie Baker:

Yeah. Like breast cancer. I mean, as the French Health Minister said back in the day, it is the moral property of women, and we need to take control of it. 

00:20:58 Michele Goodwin:

I don’t think that there would be a better way to conclude this episode than what you just said there, Carrie. Thank you so much for joining us for 15 Minutes of Feminism. Wishing you and our listeners a Happy New Year. Thank you so much, Carrie.

00:21:10 Carrie Baker:
Great to be here. 

Guests and listeners. That’s it for today’s episode of On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine. I want to thank each of you for tuning in for the full story and engaging with us. We hope you’ll join us again for our next episode where you know we’ll be reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. For more information about what we discussed today, head to Msmagazine.com and be sure to subscribe. And if you believe, as we do, that women’s voices matter, that equality for all persons cannot be delayed, and that rebuilding America and being unbought and unbossed and reclaiming our time are important, then be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to On the Issues with Michele Goodwin at Ms. Magazine and Apple Podcast, Spotify, IHeart Radio, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, wherever it is that you receive your podcast. We are ad free and reader supported. 

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This has been your host, Michele Goodwin, reporting, rebelling, and telling it just like it is. On the Issues with Michele Goodwin is a Ms. Magazine joint production. Michele Goodwin and Kathy Spillar are our executive producers. Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug, and also Allison Whelan. Our social media content producer is Sophia Panigrahi. The creative vision behind our work includes Art & Design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Hadland, and music by Chris J. Lee.