(Another predictable NY Times Editorial)

RU-486, the French-manufactured "abortion pill" which should be available here in about two years, has been used safely by thousands of Europeans. Furthermore, the fact that it can be administered in a physician's office and not in a clinic vulnerable to blockades and bullets permits the procedure to be what it should be: a very private decision between a woman and her doctor.

It is also a pill that may have far wider application - provided its manufacturer, Roussel-Uclaf, is willing to brave America's anti-abortion activists. A recent study by A National Academy of Sciences panel found great potential in antiprogestins, a class of drug used in RU-486. "There appear I to be a lot more uses for these drugs than simply as abortive agents," the panel's chairman, Dr. Leslie Z. Benet, said last week.

Such as: a treatment for endometriosis, a runaway growth of the tissue lining the uterus, which affects 10 to 12 million American women'; for breast cancer, which is diagnosed in 175,000 every year, and for fibroid tumors, the most frequent reason for surgery in premenopausal women. If, ""that is, the potential uses of RU-486 are researched as aggressively as they deserve.

For years Roussel-Uclaf and its German parent company, Hoechst AG, refused to test RU-486 in the United States for fear of American boycott of their other pharmaceuticals. That the most prominent supporters of anti-abortion activists were two successive Presidents only strengthened the companies' timidity. But with a pro-choice President in' the White House, Roussel finally agreed on a contract with a research group that will attempt to win Federal approval for RU-486 as an abortifacient and find an American manufacturer and distributor. But so far, it will do no more.

That means RU-486's potential for treating certain medical disorders will remain unexplored as long as its manufacturers remain reluctant to make the pill available to American researchers for clinical testing. Once again the reason is fear of backlash - the kind reflected in a comment from Richard D. Glasow, education director of the National Right to Life Committee, who said the new study "merely recycles exaggerated claims for the nonabortion uses of RU-486."

He also called the research on RU-486 "fragmentary and inconclusive." It is, and will remain so unless Roussel overcomes its fears; unless an American pharmaceutical company then steps forward to conduct trials, and unless Americans realize that, when it comes to RU-486, the antiabortion activists' "pro-life" agenda is cruelly anti-women.