It will be one year on April 28th since the oral abortion drug MephigoPac was approved, but only 3% of the 4176 medical institutions (in 2000) with doctors designated under the Maternal Protection Act are able to use it.
According to Yomiuri Shimbun, only 724 people used it during the first six months after its launch. Compared to the 60,000 abortions in half of the yearly number of abortions in recent years, this is only 1.2% of the total. The bottlenecks that have prevented the abortion pill from spreading are the "designated doctor system," "expensive fees," "hospitalization requirements," and "spousal consent requirements." Such a severe control would make it the same as the oral contraceptives approved in 1999, which now have a 2-3% usage rate even 25 years after the approval.
If abortion is not complete after taking a one-product of MephigoPack, repeating misoprostol every three hours will lead to an almost 100% success rate, and the additional dosage is only about 100 yen per dose as recommended by the UN. Taking misoprostol repeatedly will treat miscarriage which stops midway through. This will lead to an increase in the success rate to almost 100% and no surgical procedure is required. The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare should approve the use of non-applicable drugs and prohibit the "additional charge of 50,000 yen if the drug alone does not finish the process.
