Republicans and right-wing media have jumped on a new report published by a conservative think tank that claims the abortion drug mifepristone is harmful to women. Experts tell HuffPost that the study is junk science — but that’s not stopping abortion opponents from using it to lobby for more abortion pill restrictions.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center published the report just days after FDA Commissioner Martin Makary said he has “no plans” to restrict mifepristone, which has been at the center of the abortion wars since the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Makary made several headlines for his comments, seemingly assuring pro-choice Americans that he would not pull FDA approval of the drug.
But in that same interview, Makary also said: “As you may know, there is an ongoing set of data that is coming into FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data that we have not yet seen.” President Donald Trump announced his intent to appoint Makary to helm the FDA soon after the November election, and the former Fox News contributor — who routinely spread anti-abortion misinformation — was confirmed by the Senate last month.
The same day the report was released, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) sent a letter to Makary quoting the FDA commissioner’s above statement and urging him to “follow this new data and take all appropriate action to restore critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone.” Hawley, a leading anti-abortion advocate, asked Makary to restore certain requirements to access mifepristone, which the Biden administration loosened during the COVID pandemic. Hawley asked Makary to respond by May 15, adding, “The health and safety of American women depend on it.”
The timing of Makary’s comments, the report and Hawley’s letter has set off alarms among reproductive health groups.
“It’s troubling that President Trump’s new FDA commissioner has refused to acknowledge mifepristone’s longstanding record of overwhelming safety and efficacy,” Liz Wagner, senior federal policy counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told HuffPost. “And it’s even more troubling that a deeply flawed, non-peer-reviewed ‘study’ was released by an anti-abortion group immediately after Dr. Makary told a reporter that the FDA may act on ‘a real signal’ on mifepristone.”
Makary, along with Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have said they will defer to new research on mifepristone to determine whether it is safe to use. Kennedy even said the president has tasked him with studying the safety of the abortion pill. But decades of evidence-based research and peer-reviewed studies have already proven mifepristone to be extremely safe and effective.
When asked if the FDA is considering Hawley’s request, an agency spokesperson told HuffPost: “The FDA is committed to safeguarding public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and quality of the products it regulates. The agency rigorously evaluates the latest scientific data, leveraging gold standard science to make informed decisions. With a steadfast focus on protecting consumers, the FDA applies a balanced, science-based approach while incorporating practical, common-sense considerations to its regulatory processes.”
The agency also pointed HuffPost to Makary’s comment that the FDA may act if there’s a “real signal” in data regarding mifepristone. When HuffPost asked if the EPPC report is the “ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone” that Makary referred to, the spokesperson did not respond.
Republicans have been chomping at the bit to roll back access to the abortion pill through the FDA, either by restricting how patients can get the medication or pulling it off shelves altogether. The EPPC is an advisory board member of Project 2025, an extreme right-wing policy agenda that details how to ban abortion nationwide, including restricting or banning mifepristone using Trump appointees in the FDA. One of the two authors of the EPPC report, and the group’s president, previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank that led Project 2025.
Right-wing media outlets and anti-abortion advocacy groups jumped on the EPPC report, and several high-profile Republicans pointed to it as a reason mifepristone should be restricted.
“The science is clear: the abortion pill is not safe for women & never has been,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) tweeted. Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) tweeted the report and wrote: “Read more to learn about the lies the Biden admin told women about this dangerous drug.”
The EPPC report claims it’s the “largest-known study of the abortion pill” and that nearly 11% of women “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
Rachel Jones, a principal research scientist at the Guttmacher Institute, said she would not call this paper a “study” since it was not peer-reviewed. The EPPC report also does not include its dataset and procedure codes — an unusual decision that makes it impossible for other researchers to fully assess the methodology and integrity of its results.
When HuffPost reached EPPC for comment, communications director Hunter Estes said the group is unable to share the full dataset with the public. Estes told HuffPost that the report was not peer-reviewed because “the extensive pro-abortion bias in the peer-review process” creates “no opportunities to publish peer-reviewed analysis that offer major substantive critiques of the abortion pill or abortion.”
“Even apart from all the red flags with the data and supposed analysis, the fact where they land in the recommendations — that has nothing to do with the research itself — indicates this was driven more by ideology than by scientific rigor,” Jones told HuffPost.
For example, the recommendations in the report include that mifepristone should only be used up to seven weeks of pregnancy, but the data did not look at outcomes by length of gestation. Additionally, the authors recommend that only physicians should provide mifepristone, but the analysis didn’t distinguish between whether the pill was provided by a physician or an advanced practice clinician. When asked how EPPC arrived at the policy recommendations included in the paper, Estes repeated the recommendations published in the report.
“For 25 years, objective safety data has shown that medication abortion is safe, full stop,” said Wagner, from the Center for Reproductive Rights. “If political appointees at the FDA decide that anti-abortion propaganda should influence their review process, it will diminish the FDA’s standing and credibility.”