Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is as soon as once more spreading misinformation in regards to the abortion capsule mifepristone, and has taken his marketing campaign a step additional by introducing laws to ban it.
The Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act, which Hawley launched on Wednesday, would bar using mifepristone for abortions by withdrawing the U.S. Meals and Drug Administration’s 26-year approval of the remedy. The invoice would additionally enable girls allegedly harmed by the drug to sue producers of mifepristone.
“We’re right here right this moment to problem a name to motion,” Hawley stated at a press convention saying the invoice. “To name on the USA Congress to face up and to guard the harmless unborn, to guard the well being and security of ladies whose lives are endangered by the abortion drug referred to as mifepristone, and we’re additionally right here to name on Congress to face as much as the grasping and overseas firms who’re making billions of {dollars} in earnings by endangering girls’s well being.”
Hawley, who has continually attacked abortion pill access, claimed repeatedly that mifepristone is “inherently harmful” and “fully unregulated.” He highlighted tales of ladies being coerced or compelled by boyfriends into taking the abortion capsule. As an alternative of going after the lads who abused their companions, Hawley desires to ban remedy used extensively and safely by thousands and thousands of individuals because the FDA first accepted the drug in 2000.
The legislation is unlikely to go since Hawley will want 60 votes within the Senate, and Republicans solely have 53 seats. However influential Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has already proven help for the invoice, tweeting on Thursday that he was “all in” on the trouble.
It is sensible that anti-abortion advocates have set their sights on the capsule: Treatment abortion (the mix of mifepristone and one other drug, misoprostol) now accounts for no less than 63% of all abortion care because the Supreme Court docket repealed Roe v. Wade. In 2024, 1 in 4 abortions within the U.S. have been supplied by telehealth.
“The Dobbs opinion is mainly a useless letter as long as these abortion medicine could be mailed into each state,” Hawley stated in the course of the press convention.
But again, Hawley pointed to a junk science report revealed final yr by the Ethics and Public Coverage Middle, a conservative suppose tank and advisory board member of Mission 2025. The report claims it’s the “largest-known examine of the abortion capsule” and that just about 11% of ladies “expertise sepsis, an infection, hemorrhaging, or one other critical opposed occasion inside 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
However the report just isn’t peer-reviewed, and knowledge scientists have repeatedly voiced serious concerns about its validity. The EPPC report flies within the face of many years of high-quality analysis and a whole lot of research on mifepristone.
“The science is settled: mifepristone is secure and efficient,” Blair Darney, vice chairman for home analysis on the Guttmacher Institute, stated in an announcement. “Many years of rigorous analysis from the U.S. and around the globe has constantly demonstrated that critical opposed occasions happen in lower than 1% of all remedy abortions, a far cry from the one in ten statistic that anti-abortion policymakers have been citing in one more baseless try to limit entry to this essential remedy.”
That is simply the latest assault from Hawley. Final yr, he introduced a legislation to ban the mailing of abortion capsules and pushed the FDA to review the protection of mifepristone, citing the EPPC’s junk science report.
This comes throughout a time when abortion opponents are fracturing away from President Donald Trump. The administration is reportedly slow-walking the FDA’s overview of mifepristone till after the 2026 midterm elections — enfuriating far-right anti-abortion advocates who’ve called for the head of the FDA to step down. Abortion opponents are additionally indignant with Trump after the administration moved last week to dismiss a federal lawsuit towards the abortion capsule.
