Editorial written by St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board.
As Missouri and many other states continue their fractious political battles over the issue of reproductive rights, a Trump administration project is threatening to undermine those rights nationally: The Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally launching a “safety review” of mifepristone, the widely used abortion-inducing medication, based on nothing but junk science conjured up by anti-choice activists.
The FDA review was confirmed at a Senate hearing last week by (it should come as no surprise) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration’s Health and Human Services secretary and chief purveyor of anti-science nonsense. Kennedy justified the review by citing scientifically suspect, ideologically driven “research” that presumes to contradict decades of mainstream medical data.
The strategy here isn’t difficult to see: With voters in recent years protecting reproductive rights even in red states like Missouri, and with passage of a federal abortion ban remaining politically unlikely, the administration will attempt to use the medical safety issue to impede abortion access nationally — without a single vote by members of Congress or anyone else. If they’re successful, abortion services will become far more difficult to access even in states with laws fully protecting that right.
Mifepristone, in conjunction with misoprostol, safely induces abortion early in pregnancy without the necessity of surgery or even the physical involvement of a doctor. As the Supreme Court’s 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade has threatened reproductive rights in Missouri and other red states, medication abortions have grown more common. They now account for more than 63% of all abortions, according to the pro-choice Guttmacher Institute.
In recent years, as medical data has confirmed the safety and effectiveness of the mifepristone-misoprostol regimen, federal regulations have been loosened to make them more accessible. Among the regulatory changes is that the drugs now can be prescribed remotely, can be delivered through the mail and no longer require multiple clinic visits for their use.
Those developments have put power in the hands of women seeking to terminate pregnancies privately, without having to brave clinic picket lines. Needless to say, the anti-choice movement doesn’t like that and has been working to reverse the loosening of those restrictions.
Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley has been among chief proponents of that strategy. Hawley, in prompting questioning of Kennedy at last week’s Senate hearing, cited a recent study from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. The report, based in part on analyses of insurance data from more than 856,000 cases of medication abortions, claims almost 11% of women experienced adverse effects from the drug.
That’s much higher than the 0.5% adverse effects that have been found by numerous clinical studies over years. Who to believe? Well, such clinical studies are peer reviewed and fully reveal their sources of data. The Public Policy Center study did neither — which means its conclusions could be widely skewed in all kinds of ways.
Nonetheless, Kennedy told Hawley and other senators that, “at very least,” the labeling on mifepristone should be changed to ditch the reams of peer-reviewed data (not to mention decades of safe use around the world). Instead, he says, the labeling should reflect the fuzzy conclusions of an activist entity that, as The Washington Post reports, has the self-described mission of opposing “the extreme progressive agenda while building consensus of conservatives.”
Hawley et al say they want to restore the onerous restrictions that mainstream medical science has found to be unnecessary. Does anyone who has watched the abortion debate unfold in the past few years believe a victory on that front would prompt them to take the win and go home? Or is it more likely they would view it as encouragement to take the next logical step of attempting to outlaw these drugs altogether?
Outlawing the drugs is a stated goal of Project 2025, the far-right governmental blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that President Donald Trump tried to disavow before embarking on a second term that has been defined by his attempts to implement it virtually point by point.
The Public Policy Center is on the Project 2025 advisory board. Should they get their way, the women of Missouri and throughout America will lose even more of the right to self-determination than they’ve already lost.
