On Tuesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced a bill to restrict the abortion pill mifepristone, citing an anti-abortion junk science report that was published last week, and is at the heart of the anti-abortion movement’s latest strategy to pave the way for a national ban on medication abortion. Hawley’s “Restoring Safeguard for Dangerous Abortion Drugs Act” would restore 2011 restrictions on medication abortion that were imposed by the Food and Drug Administration, needlessly requiring in-person visits for doctors to prescribe the medication, which most commonly involves the pills mifepristone and misoprostol. This would ban telemedicine access to abortion pills, which accounts for 20% of all abortions in the U.S. and has been crucial to help people in abortion-banned states get care. Hawley’s bill would require follow-up, in-person visits and ban use of medication abortion past seven weeks.
“The data shows 1 in 10 women who take mifepristone experience adverse health effects, like going to the ER or suffering from sepsis. The FDA needs to act to protect women now,” Hawley said in a press release announcing the bill. Last week, Hawley wrote a letter to pressure the Trump-run FDA to reinstate previous restrictions on mifepristone, including ending telemedicine prescriptions for it and rolling back FDA approval from 10 weeks to seven. In Hawley’s letter, he cited a biased, right-wing report misrepresenting medication abortion as unsafe.
Hawley’s bill comes as anti-abortion leaders are zeroing in on that report as a new pathway to potentially ban the medication, according to a Wednesday report in Politico. The report was published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, last week, and claims to show widespread complications and side effects stemming from the use of abortion pills. According to Politico, on a Zoom call attended by top anti-abortion leaders across the country, the movement refers to this strategy as “Rolling Thunder.”
About two-thirds of abortions in the U.S. are medication abortions, which most commonly involve the pills mifepristone and misoprostol. Both were approved by the FDA 25 years ago after rigorous testing and research showed the medications are highly safe and less likely to result in serious complications than Tylenol.
Brittni Frederiksen, the associate director for Women’s Health Policy at the nonpartisan health care think tank KFF, told Politico of the EPPC report, “There’s just so many things wrong with it and so many red flags. I can’t imagine any medical journal that would accept this.” For instance, the report claims that abortion pills can cause ectopic pregnancies, which can be life-threatening and occur when an embryo implants outside a uterus; the supposed basis for this claim is that patients with ectopic pregnancies underway are told not to take medication abortion pills because they won’t end the ectopic pregnancy. The report also cites cases of people who have needed to have in-clinic abortions because abortion pills didn’t completely end their pregnancies—but this is a known potential outcome from taking abortion pills, and needing follow-up care is hardly life-threatening.
On the Zoom call, anti-abortion leaders like Americans United for Life CEO John Mize stated that they intend to use the EPPC “study” to bring False Claims Act cases against doctors who tell patients that medication abortion is safe. Mize said this could be a means to challenge shield laws in liberal states that protect abortion providers who mail pills into abortion-banned states from legal repercussions. Anti-abortion activists said this is only a “first step,” signaling they want the medication pushed even further out of reach, still.
On the call, Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, reminded her fellow anti-abortion leaders that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy expressed openness to researching potential harms of medication abortion (which, I can’t stress this enough, has already been extensively tested and researched) and further restricting it depending on his findings. “Kennedy has said he wants to dig into this question of harms to women, and you provided him this data,” Dannenfelser said, according to Politico. Pointing to the EPPC report, she added, “Now you’ve got great data, HHS director. You’ve got data, administration, that you can dig into, and you can go ahead and also do your own studies.”
Dannenfelser further pointed to meetings with Hawley and other congressional Republicans about the EPPC report that she claimed have been successful: “Right away it is very clear that the release of this data … has gotten attention at the highest levels in the administration and on Capitol Hill.”
Rolling Thunder” comes as GOP lawmakers across the country are throwing everything at the wall to try to ban abortion pills—including baselessly framing the medication as a public health hazard that’s contaminating water supplies. One Texas bill would require wastewater treatment plants to test for abortion pills and even hormones commonly found in birth control, as well as testosterone and estrogen, claiming all of these pose a threat to pregnant people and children. Legal experts warn that it’s a pretext to eventually ban all abortion pills. Since at least 2022, the anti-abortion group Students for Life has been very vocally advocating for the FDA to revoke approval of abortion pills on the basis of their nonexistent environmental impact.
Elsewhere, Louisiana is attempting to extradite and prosecute a New York-based abortion provider who allegedly mailed pills into the state, while Texas, too, is pursuing legal action against the same doctor. Anti-abortion organizations are even openly recruiting men in abortion-banned states like Texas to file legal actions against intimate partners who’ve had abortions—all as a means to identify out-of-state abortion providers and trigger lawsuits that could ban interstate mailing of the pills.
All of that is to say that “Rolling Thunder” and the weaponization of a patently propagandistic study into the “dangers” of abortion pills are really just the latest in the right’s fight against abortion.
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