A single junk-science study may now dictate access to the most common form of abortion in the U.S.

In a stunning move that could mark the first step toward a nationwide ban on abortion pills, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has ordered the FDA to reevaluate its decades-old approval of mifepristone—a medication used safely by over 7.5 million Americans over the last quarter-century for abortion and treatment of miscarriages. The directive, based on a single junk-science report from an antiabortion group, signals a dangerous shift: the politicization of FDA policy and a coordinated push to strip access to medication abortion across the country.

As recently as late April, FDA commissioner Marty Makary said he had “no plans to take action” on mifepristone, but admitted there was an “ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone” and that “we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data that we have not yet seen” if it “suggests something.”

Within days, the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, released their report—which experts describe as “deeply flawed” and contradicting over 100 peer-reviewed studies showing mifepristone to be very safe—falsely claiming that one in 10 of women using mifepristone had serious adverse reactions to the medication. Citing this report, Republicans then called on the FDA to restrict access to mifepristone.

The FDA’s “policy changes will ultimately go through the White House, through President Trump,” said Kennedy in the May 14 Senate hearing where he announced the directive.

The FDA has historically made decisions based on peer-reviewed research from scientists and doctors, not from elected officials with little understanding of science or medicine.

“Secretary Kennedy just revealed that he has ordered the FDA to consider making it harder for people to get medication abortions based on propaganda pushed out by a Project 2025 sponsor,” said Julia Kaye, senior staff attorney for the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. “Even leading antiabortion advocates admit this junk science is ‘not a study in the traditional sense,’ and is ‘not conclusive proof of anything,’ but that clearly won’t stop extremist politicians from waving it around as a basis to restrict abortion.”

Mifepristone in combination with a second medication, misoprostol, is the gold standard for abortion care and is used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States. Misoprostol can be used alone to end an early pregnancy, with similar rates of safety and effectiveness, but often has more side effects.

“This baseless investigation into the FDA’s regulations on mifepristone is an escalation of the Trump administration’s attack on abortion and on scientific evidence more broadly,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute. “While it’s shocking that the FDA would investigate mifepristone based on shoddy research, it’s even more stunning that Secretary Kennedy embraced, rather than rejected, the notion of political interference in scientific and medical decisions that impact the health and safety of Americans. This … has potential to disrupt the abortion provision landscape nationwide, even in states that have protected abortion access.”

‘Rolling Thunder’: The Coordinated Strategy to Restrict Abortion Pills Nationwide

The antiabortion movement calls its current campaign to remove mifepristone from the market “Rolling Thunder.” But the coordinated campaign is not just about scaling back access to abortion pills. It’s a step-by-step plan to eliminate medication abortion entirely. First, they aim to block telehealth, mail delivery and later-term access—but their endgame is banning mifepristone nationwide. This isn’t regulation; it’s erasure.

“We should all be scared if our access to safe, FDA-approved medications turns on President Trump’s gut instinct rather than credible scientific evidence,” said Kaye, who fears Trump may fall for their antiabortion propaganda. “This new FDA review has nothing to do with science and everything to do with teeing up nationwide restrictions on abortion.”

Policy Built on Junk Science

The Society of Family planning identified numerous flaws in the study, including:

• incorrectly counting emergency room visits as “serious adverse events,” which contradicts FDA guidance;
• wrongly classifying classified routine follow-up visits and emergency room visits without any treatment as “serious adverse events,” contradicting longstanding FDA definitions;
• conflating abortion with miscarriage and other uses of mifepristone, which leads to an inflated rate of complications;
• lacking a standardized definition of hemorrhage, likely capturing normal bleeding as a “serious adverse event”; and
• incorrectly including ectopic pregnancy as a complication of medication abortion in the study.

The authors of the report did not reveal the database they used and did not identify or explain more than half of the alleged adverse events they cited.

The report is “so full of flaws that any credible scientist would laugh it out of the lab,” said Kaye, who noted the report did not address whether the abortions reviewed were provided by telehealth, which is the likely target of the campaign.

One of the report’s two co-authors, Ryan T. Anderson, published a 2022 book subtitled, Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.

Misrepresenting the safety of abortion pills is a longstanding strategy of the antiabortion movement.

Is a Telehealth Abortion Ban Next?

Reproductive freedom advocates are concerned that the FDA could ban telehealth abortion, now used in 20 percent of U.S. abortions and a critical avenue of access for people living in rural areas without abortion providers and in states banning medical professionals within their borders from providing abortion care.

“The obvious goal is to change FDA policy to make it even harder for people across the country to get an abortion,” said Kaye at a May 15 press conference. “They are trying to use junk science as an excuse to chip away at access.”

Roughly 63 percent of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center polls. During his campaign, Trump promised to let states determine abortion access and reiterated that promise in early April.

“If the FDA moves forward with this politically motivated review, that is a dangerous sign that the president is going back on his promises to voters not to restrict abortion access even further,” said Kaye, who noted that the FDA in fact already restricts mifepristone more than the science warrants.

Abortion Is Not Going Away

In a press release in response to Kennedy’s announcement, the public health organization Plan C stated, “Abortion pills are safe, effective, life-saving medications, whether obtained through a clinic visit, via telehealth, or as a self-managed option.” They noted that “abortion pills are accessible in all states and territories, including states with heavy restrictions, and can be kept on hand for two years.”

Plan C’s website has complete, regularly-updated information on how people are obtaining abortion medications in every U.S. state and territory, including from U.S.-based and international telehealth providers offering quick delivery of medications for sliding scale fees, community networks sharing free abortion pills in restrictive states and reliable e-commerce websites selling abortion pills for as little as $65. The Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline provides free and confidential medical support for people self-managing abortions.

“The international telehealth providers, the community networks and the e-commerce sites will likely grow and strengthen in their capacity as the environment around access changes due to political restriction of the pills in the U.S.,” said Plan C’s access director and co-founder Elisa Wells. “Thanks to alternative routes of access from abroad and through community groups, abortion is here to stay.”