Image: Etienne-Emile Baulieu, age 98, at home in Paris
9 January 2024
In 1982, Etienne-Emile Baulieu, a researcher, discovered the molecule he called RU-486, a medical solution for abortion. In Paris, on 10 January 2025, as France was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the legalisation of abortion on 17 January 2025, the 98-year-old professor recalled the virulent lobbying against the sale of his invention. In a home overflowing with books and awards forgotten on his mantelpiece, he reflected: “I will always support movements that fight for women’s right to prevent unwanted pregnancy.”
Thanks to mifepristone, which counteracts the effects of progesterone – essential for a healthy pregnancy – women have an early, less invasive method of pregnancy termination than surgery (by curettage or suction). At the time of his research, in the early 1980s, Professor Baulieu spoke of it as the “pill against pregnancy”. Eventually, the term “abortion pill” came into use instead.
An outburst of violence
Baulieu, now 98, is hardly surprised by what’s happening in the United States: the long history of his invention is a turbulent scientific saga, peppered with epic administrative twists and turns, and heated controversies surrounding abortion. From the very first presentation of his work on this molecule, at the Palais de l’Institut in Paris on 19 April 1982, Baulieu, who had just been admitted to the Académie des Sciences, became the target of anti-abortion movements.
Despite being described as “a major breakthrough” by the New England Journal of Medicine, a leading American medical journal, his invention aroused hostility all over the world, even before it was put on the market. This was particularly the case in the US, where Republican politician Robert Dornan renamed it the “death pill”.
The outburst of violence was unprecedented: The scientist remembers the signs reading “Baulieu = Mengele” and a debate on 27 September 1988, on the former TV channel La Cinq, during which Dr. Jérôme Lejeune claimed: “This product will kill more human beings than Hitler, Mao Zedong and Stalin put together.” In the US, where Baulieu travelled only under the protection of bodyguards, a bomb exploded under a podium where he was due to give a lecture.
A handful of doctors
Despite this hostility, the whole world took an interest in this revolution – notably China and India, but also the United Kingdom, Hungary and Sweden, where the World Health Organization began clinical trials in 1982. The whole world was included, except France, where “none of the big bosses of Parisian gynaecology departments agreed to take part in the trials,” recalled Baulieu.
Only a handful of doctors, committed to the cause of women’s rights, were resisting. Among them, gynecologist David Elia, a doctor at the Mutuelle Nationale des Étudiants de France, organized a very strict clinical framework, “bordering on paranoia,” to avoid any risk to his patients, he recounts in his 1990 book Pour la passion des femmes (“For the Passion of Women”).
In it, the gynaecologist, who died in 2021, recalled the very first candidate for RU-486, a 23-year-old literature student who had forgotten to take her pill two nights in a row. It was February 28, 1983. “I go through ups and downs. But when I get discouraged, I draw from Etienne-Emile Baulieu the courage to believe,” wrote Elia.
A ‘not exactly noble’ subject
A resolute optimist, the scientist who won numerous awards, including the prestigious Albert Lasker, was born in Strasbourg in 1926. He was just 3 years old when his father, Léon Blum, a renowned nephrologist of the time, died. The child grew up with his mother Thérèse Lion, a lawyer, and his two sisters. “I had a feminist mother whom I respected and admired greatly. Women are the commitment of my life.”
A leftist who joined the Resistance when he was still a teenager, he chose the path of medicine and research. It was thanks to Max-Fernand Jayle, a biochemistry professor – “the most important encounter of my life” – that he began to take an interest in sex hormones, a subject seen as “not exactly noble” at the time.
On 23 September 1988, RU-486 was launched on the French market by Roussel-Uclaf laboratories. On 21 October 1988, Baulieu was in Rio de Janeiro for the 12th World Congress of Gynecology and Obstetrics when the announcement was made. Media from all over the world flocked to the event. The professor was confident: He was told that in Paris, women were mobilizing and that in Rio, the petition circulating among doctors had been signed by 2,000 people.
“RU486: the moral property of women”
Yet RU-486 was withdrawn only a month later. The then Minister of Health, Claude Evin, “learned of the withdrawal while listening to the radio while shaving, that Roussel-Uclaf had decided to stop marketing this product,” recalled Evin. As soon as he arrived at the Ministry, he called Edouard Sakiz, the company president, who told him about the pressure he was under. Threatening letters and photos of dismembered fetuses were arriving daily at Roussel-Uclaf’s headquarters. “You’re turning the womb into an oven!” shouted some people, dressed up as Holocaust deportees.
Faced with this aggressive campaign, Sakiz felt he was unable to continue producing and distributing the drug. But Evin retorted: “Then I’m going to have to force you to.” As he explained in a recent interview, “there was no reason to deprive women of a product that represented medical progress.” The Minister immediately called a press conference to announce the pill’s return to the market, using this improvised phrase, which has gone down in history: “RU-486 has become the moral property of women.”
Yet the protest continued unabated and was even growing. Particularly in the US, where the president of the anti-abortion National Right to Life threatened the German group Hoechst AG (which owns Roussel-Uclaf) with a boycott of its products. The intimidation worked: After Bill Clinton took office in 1993, the laboratories handed over the rights to RU486 in the US to the Population Council. “We know that Professor Wolfgang Hilger, president of Hoechst, for personal reasons in particular, does not want his company to be present in the abortion sector,” Sakiz told Le Monde in April 1993. Four years later, in April 1997, Hoechst gave up RU-486 altogether. But no one else who mattered did.
The Human Reproduction Programme, based at the World Health Organization, under Paul Van Look, hugely contributed to the development of the combi-pack of mifepristone & misoprostol that we know today in the following years. Both because of the growing number of countries with laws permitting abortion with pills and despite efforts to prevent access to and distribution of abortion pills, the mife & miso combination are available and sought after pretty much all over the world.
Women on Web recommend: If you are at risk of an unintended/unwanted pregnancy, make sure you have a packet at the ready in your bathroom cupboard – just in case. It’s very good advice.
“Some people find it unacceptable to intervene in the progress of a pregnancy. That is their right,” Baulieu was quoted as saying at the end of the Le Monde article, but, he continued: “I believe that a woman’s right to a safe abortion, both physically and mentally, is irreversible.”
By 2022, according to the French National Institute for Demographic Studies, just over three-quarters of abortions in France were carried out using the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol abortion pills. Le Monde ends by saying: “Today, the tireless researcher continues his work on depression and Alzheimer’s disease in his laboratory in Kremlin-Bicêtre, Paris, where he is still regularly present.”
SOURCE: Le Monde, by Zineb Dryef, 17 January 2025. PHOTO by Emma Le Doyen, Le Magazine du Monde. Many thanks to Véronique Sehier, from the Planning Familial, for the translation of the original article into English. Editing of the English by MB.