Medication abortion activist recalls fight to get it approved

Beverly Winikoff was a central figure in mifepristone getting cleared by the FDA. Now she talks about what she expects next.

Beverly Winikoff was one of the central figures behind the campaign to make medication abortion available to the public. She spent decades pushing for greater access to mifepristone in the United States.

Winikoff’s work was highlighted in Carrie N. Baker’s terrific book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics, which I wrote about over the weekend. Winikoff was the director of reproductive health for the Population Council, which was the central organization behind the campaign for the abortion pill in the 1990s and 2000s. Now, she is the president of Gynuity Health Projects, a New York-based research institution that publishes reports on medication abortion, contraception, and obstetric complications.

I spoke to Winikoff on the phone. We brushed on several topics, including what will happen with the new political reality brought by a Trump presidency.

“Anything could happen. These people are crazy,” Winikoff told me over the phone. “You can't get inside a crazy head if you're not crazy.”

In Baker’s book, Winikoff is central in pushing the Food and Drug Administration for approval and looser restrictions on mifepristone. FDA workers met it with a great deal of trepidation. Antiabortion violence had taken hold of much of the country. That made it seem perilous.

“There were people who didn't want to do it because they were afraid,” Winikoff said to me.

Winikoff thought the process of loosening the restrictions was gradual, which she felt was standard for all medications. That’s, in part, why she adopted an incremental approach. It was a small victory after a small victory. That helped reduce the chance that people would find fault with one step in the progression toward a medical climate that permitted abortion medication on a broader scale.

“That's that's the way medicine is, and it has been for a long time. So it wasn't like a revolution.”

We talked about the risk that many women in antiabortion states face now that the bans have forced doctors to take a more hesitant approach, given the potential legal consequences for performing abortions.

“States really have to start getting into it and making sure that doctors do what they need to do to save people's lives,” Winikoff said.

“I think we have to have more anger about that.”