WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Biden administration “twisted” data on the safety of abortion pills to protect them, U.S. Secretary of Health & Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said during his Thursday appearance before the Senate Finance Committee.
Bloomberg Law reports that, during the wide-ranging cross examination, Republican members asked Kennedy for an update on the “complete review” of the safety data for chemical abortions that he promised in May. The secretary declined to give a time frame for final conclusions but said information gathering was ongoing.
“We’re getting data in all the time, new data on that, we’re reviewing,” he said. “We know that during the Biden administration, they actually twisted the data, to bury one of the safety signals, a very high safety signal, around 11 percent, so we’re going to make sure that that doesn’t happen anymore.”
Kennedy was also asked about the prospects of reversing former President Joe Biden’s rule changes allowing abortion pills to be distributed by mail, without an in-person doctor’s visit. Kennedy demurred, saying he did not know the White House’s current stance on the matter. President Donald Trump said on the campaign trail last year he would not reverse it.
The Trump administration has taken multiple pro-life actions since returning to office, mostly in the realm of cutting off federal funds to the abortion industry at home and abroad, as well as pardoning peaceful pro-life activists who had been pursued by the previous administration. But it has yet to move against the availability of abortion pills, despite their critical role in undermining state protections for the preborn. Pro-lifers hope that the eventual completion of HHS’s safety review will spur the Trump administration to action.
Twelve states currently ban all or most abortions. But the unregulated, no-oversight distribution of abortion pills across state lines has become arguably the abortion lobby’s most effective tactic for preserving abortion “access,” and are particularly problematic in pro-life states, to which they can be sent and taken in complete privacy, without any sign law enforcement can act on.
In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.”
This is despite the fact that a 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.” A recent Charlotte Lozier Institute study also found that most emergency room visits stemming from abortion pill complications are misattributed to miscarriages, further making the pills appear safer than they really are.
“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”
