A new report is calling on the Trump administration to reinstate safety protocols for prescribing abortion pill in light of new data showing that more than 10% of women who took the drug experienced adverse health effects.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center released a report Monday titled “The Abortion Pill Harms Women: Insurance Data Reveals One in Ten Patients Experiences a Serious Adverse Event.” The report is based on an “analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone-induced abortions from 2017 to 2023.”
The number of mifepristone abortions examined by the Ethics and Public Policy Center is significantly higher than the 30,966 participants included in clinical trials of the abortion pill, also known as mifepristone, cited by the Food and Drug Administration as well as the drug’s manufacturer. While FDA clinical trials found that 0.5% of women who took the abortion pill experienced adverse events, a much larger percentage of women included in the Ethics and Public Policy Center analysis (10.93%) experienced adverse events.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.
Overall, the Ethics and Public Policy Center measured the number of adverse events experienced by women who took the abortion pill at 94,605. This figure reflects that some women experience multiple adverse health events after taking the abortion pill. Therefore, the total listed for each type of adverse event does not add up to the overall total.
The most commonly reported adverse event fell into the category of “other abortion-specific complications,” experienced by 5.68% of the women who took mifepristone. Other serious complications with rates of greater than 1% were emergency room visits (4.73%), hemorrhages (3.31%), surgical abortions (2.84%) and infection (1.34%). Less common adverse events were hospitalization (0.66%), ectopic pregnancies (0.35%), “other life-threatening adverse events” (0.22%), transfusion (0.15%) and sepsis (0.10%).
Pro-life groups pointed to the results of the report as evidence that stronger protections are needed to prevent women from experiencing adverse effects of the abortion pill. As statistics in the report noted, use of the abortion pill has skyrocketed since its approval by the FDA in 2000. Mifepristone abortions now constitute two-thirds of all pregnancy terminations in the United States.
In a statement on Monday, National Right to Life Director of Education and Research Randall O’Bannon asserted, “Every time pro-lifers want to challenge safety claims made about the abortion pill mifepristone, abortion advocates and their loyal media allies like to quote the claim of the drug’s official label from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that clinical studies showed ‘Serious adverse reactions were reported in
“New data taken from the field show figures are twenty-two times that.” O’Bannon added, referring to the report. “Women are told that the complication rate for chemical abortions is minimal but hemorrhage, infection and failure to identify rupturing ectopic pregnancies are the realities.”
“Tracking these complications became more difficult in 2016 when the FDA decided that medical personnel and facilities only need to report deaths — not the complications arising from the use of the abortion pill mifepristone,” O’Bannon concluded.
Marjorie Dannenfelser of the pro-life advocacy group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America offered similar analysis of the report in a statement provided to The Christian Post.
Dannenfelser characterized the report as a direct repudiation of the claim that “abortion drugs are ‘safer than Tylenol’” and part of “a growing body of evidence” finding that “these risky drugs are much more dangerous than advertised.” She insisted that “the harm to women and girls as well as their unborn children simply can’t be ignored.”
“Even in the corporate media, reports have surfaced of at least three women dying in recent years after drug-induced abortions,” Dannenfelser stated. “All three deaths occurred after [former President Joe] Biden’s FDA removed critical safety protections for women and girls, including the requirement to see a doctor in person — making the deadly drugs widely available by mail-order to abusers and traffickers who assault and poison their victims.”
Looming large in the report as well as the reactions to it from pro-life activists is a call for the FDA to reinstate the safety precautions in place when mifepristone was first approved in 2000, known as the risk evaluation mitigation strategies. The report documented how the risk evaluation mitigation strategies were rolled back in both 2016 and 2023, during the two most recent Democratic presidential administrations.
In a previous interview with CP, a representative with Physicians for Life said that when mifepristone first came out, the FDA had a protocol for it to be used through seven weeks, or 49 days from conception.
Because many abortion clinics in the U.S. were ignoring the FDA’s protocol and using the drug in chemical abortions up to 60 days, states began passing regulations saying they had to follow the FDA’s protocol. At the time, then-President Obama made the FDA change it to 60 days to coincide with what the abortion providers were doing.
The report explicitly calls for requiring three in-person visits to a doctor before a person can be prescribed mifepristone, limiting the ability to prescribe the drug exclusively to doctors, requiring the drug to be dispensed at a medical clinic, requiring reporting of all adverse events resulting from taking the abortion pill and not just deaths, and limiting the use of the abortion pill to women who are no more than seven weeks pregnant.
During his confirmation hearing to serve as U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. assured Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., that he would look into “safety issues” regarding the abortion pill.
Kennedy later told Fox News that President Donald Trump asked him to “study the safety” of the abortion pill. Shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election, Trump maintained that he had no intention to limit access to the abortion pill while stressing that he could change his mind in the future.
More recently, FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said last week that he had “no plans to take action” on the abortion pill while clarifying that “if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
