(LifeSiteNews) — Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. launched a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety review of the abortion drug mifepristone that could lead to restrictions on the lethal pill.
Kennedy shared earlier this year that President Donald Trump requested he conduct a study of the pill’s safety for women. As Lila Rose of Live Action has noted, “A drug designed to starve preborn babies to death can never be considered “safe.”
RFK: President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone (aka the abortion pill).
A drug designed to starve preborn babies to death can never be considered “safe.” pic.twitter.com/mecIqHBLD7
— Live Action (@LiveAction) January 29, 2025
Kennedy announced the safety study together with FDA Commissioner Marty Makary in a Sept. 19 letter to Republican attorneys general, writing, “Through the FDA, HHS will conduct a study of the safety of the current (safety protocol), in order to determine whether modifications are necessary,” Axios reported.
Given that about two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. are now chemical – the vast majority using a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol — if further restrictions on the abortion pill are enacted, abortions in the country could significantly drop.
Kennedy pledged earlier this year to ask Makary to conduct a safety study of the abortion pill when pressed by lawmakers. Sen. Hawley asked if Kennedy was aware of the Ethics and Public Policy’s recent study that showed nearly 11 percent of women in the U.S. who take mifepristone suffer serious adverse events, a rate 22 times higher than what is reported on the drug label.
“It’s alarming,” Kennedy replied, adding that it “validates” previous studies and “at the very least, the label should be changed.”
Twenty-two state attorneys general recently urged Kennedy to carry out this study, stating, “Based on that review, the FDA should consider reinstating safety protocols that it identified as necessary as recently as 2011 in its issuance of a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, but which were removed by the Obama and Biden administrations.”
Safety protocols that were dropped included requiring that the abortion pills be prescribed by a doctor and that their adverse effects be reported.
The prevalence of chemical abortions in the U.S. has rapidly increased since 2000, when the abortion pill was first approved for use by the FDA, and especially as recent administrations have rolled back abortion pill regulations.
In 2011, the drug was placed under a safety system known as REMS after serious adverse events – including multiple deaths – were reported. REMS allows the FDA to monitor these adverse events. But under the Obama FDA in 2016, requirements to report all abortion pill complications were removed. Going forward, only deaths were to be reported, significantly hampering safety data.
In 2020, a new “no-test” deregulation removed requirements for labs, testing, and blood work used to accurately date a pregnancy and rule out deadly ectopic pregnancies before dispensing abortion pills.
By December 2021, the Biden FDA axed the requirement that the abortion pill be dispensed in person and allowed them to be permanently shipped by mail.
Advocacy groups have been sounding the alarm about the dangers of the abortion pill to women – to say nothing of its lethal danger to unborn babies – since its safety data has been coming to light. A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths.”
