Score one for life, right? Well, yes and no.

With the exception of one school, all of the universities mentioned in the survey that will not issue RU-486 to students say they will not distribute the drug for one simple reason: FDA rules say they can’t.

"The only reason we don’t have it is that it’s fairly new," said Jason Snyder, a spokesman for the University of South Carolina in Columbia, S.C. "There’s nothing saying we won’t offer it in the future. The student health center is a source for students, but there are also three major hospitals within 10 minutes of here, and our health center doesn’t offer any kind of 24-hour care. There was no moral objection to it here."

Only the University of Nebraska did go on record as making a moral objection to distributing the abortion pill. Campus spokeswoman Marcia Adler said, "We give fair options, but we don’t go out of our way to help them kill babies."

Contrary to public perception, RU-486 is not a simple pill that can be taken once, like an aspirin. It’s actually two drugs – Mifeprex, which kills the fetus by blood constriction, and misoprostol (brand name Cyotec), which forces contractions to expel the dead baby from the womb. Taking them requires a woman to make several visits to a health clinic, and receive close medical supervision.

According to the FDA, the only facilities or doctors allowed to dispense RU-486 are those that can accurately assess a woman’s stage of pregnancy, as it’s illegal to use the drug after the first 49 days of gestation; diagnose ectopic pregnancies; provide a surgical abortion in case the pills don’t completely work, or refer the patient to a facility that can; and have 24-hour care available in case of complications. Many student health centers do not have a gynecologist on staff, and most are not open 24 hours-a-day.

One exception is Johns Hopkins University, which is comprised of several campuses and a renowned teaching hospital. Though RU-486 won’t be available at the student health center on the undergraduate Homewood campus, anyone being treated at the hospital can request and receive the drug, a medical campus spokesperson said.

Schools responding to ALL’s one-question, yes-or-no survey included Colby College, the University of Maine, Castleton State College, the University of Vermont, Boston University, Providence College, Yale University, the University of Connecticut, Syracuse University, Penn State University, the University of Delaware, Rutgers, Princeton, Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, the University of Richmond, the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, the University of South Carolina, Georgia Tech, the University of Georgia and all 10 schools in the Florida public university system. A sprinkling of colleges throughout the rest of the country and the West Coast were also included.

Cathy Brown, director of the WhyLife? division of ALL, which conducted the survey, said the reasons given by campus spokespeople for not offering RU-486 didn’t surprise her.

"They all basically agreed that it was a very complicated and controversial drug that comes with risky side effects to the mother," Brown said. "They did not say it was a moral decision, by any stretch of the imagination, in 99 percent of the campuses we talked to.

"We didn’t think we’d have these colleges jumping on the moral bandwagon. We just wanted to bring to light the fact that RU-486 is dangerous, and educate college officials that it doesn’t only take the life of a tiny person but can be harmful to the mother as well."

G.D. Searle, the company which manufactures Cyotec – originally developed as an anti-ulcer drug — has been criticized by the FDA, USA Today and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for taking what ordinarily would be seen as a responsible step toward protecting patients: the company revised the drug’s label and sent a letter of warning to doctors that it should not be used by pregnant women because it has been known to cause uterine ruptures. Even the liberal publication Mother Jones reported in January that off-label misoprostol used to induce labor in pregnant women over the last three years has resulted in 30 reported uterine ruptures.

Yet despite the potential non-abortion related dangers, efforts to lift the stigma associated with RU-486 are already underway, says Brown. "There are already steps being taken to loosen the guidelines – to reduce the number of visits a woman needs to make, the number of pills she has to take. It’s like anything else in the culture of death. Abortion didn’t just happen overnight. Margaret Sanger started doing Planned Parenthood-style education in the early 1900s. She had to desensitize people first.

"We have every reason to believe most of (the colleges) will change their minds in the future as Planned Parenthood gets in there and lobbies," Brown added. "We as Christians and pro-lifers should get in there and educate them before that happens. We have no idea what the long-term effects (of RU-486) are on young women’s bodies. There’s so many questions left without answers, and those are some of the things we’re hoping to bring to college administrators’ attention.

"Right now it’s strictly a logistical thing for most of them. We’d like them to say they won’t offer it because they care about the women who go to school there and because it takes the life of a human person."