President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday he will not hinder access to the abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol, attempting to dispel fears that his second administration will be detrimental to abortion rights at the federal level.
Trump told Time magazine for his Person of the Year interview that it has “always been [his] commitment” not to limit access to abortion pills, adding that he has always been “against stopping it.”
The statements from Trump will likely agitate anti-abortion members of his party, especially since the GOP leader distanced himself from their cause during his 2024 campaign, taking a states’ rights approach.
However, the blow is softened by the reality that the focus of anti-abortion policy groups this past year has not necessarily been to ban abortion pills outright but rather restore tighter regulations related to dispensing requirements.
Access to the abortion pill mifepristone and the brand name drug Mifeprex expanded under the Biden administration in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration removed requirements for patients to see a physician in person prior to being prescribed mifepristone, allowing the abortifacient to be sold online and by mail.
In 2016, the FDA also increased the gestational age that mifepristone was deemed safe to use from seven weeks to 10 weeks of pregnancy.
When asked if he would hinder or prohibit access to abortion pills, Trump said multiple times, “It would be highly unlikely.”
“I can’t imagine, but with, you know, we’re looking at everything, but highly unlikely. I guess I could say probably as close to ruling it out as possible, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything now,” said the president-elect.
Vice President Kamala Harris made abortion the largest matter in her bid for the 2024 presidential election, blaming Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Trump appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who voted for the decision.
Mifepristone access became a central feature of the campaign in part because of the Supreme Court case in March in which anti-abortion advocates asked the court to revoke the approval of the drug due to its high rate of complications. The court ultimately dismissed the case on technical grounds.
Anti-abortion advocates have since made restoring in-person screening requirements their top priority in mifepristone regulation. Specifically, they are seeking to end the ability of physicians to sell the pill online and ship it directly to patients.
Trump did not elucidate in the interview whether or not it would be within the realm of possibility for his FDA leadership to change its approvals for mifepristone to reinstitute in-person requirements or to lower the gestational age.
According to the abortion-rights Guttmacher Institute, nearly 63% of all abortions in the United States in 2023 used mifepristone. That equates to approximately 643,000 abortions last year.
The FDA’s warning label for mifepristone estimates that as many as 4.6% of self-managed abortion patients will require emergency medical treatment due to severe bleeding or possibly fatal infections.
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Trump told Time that people “feel strongly both ways, really strongly both ways, and those are the things that are dividing up the country.”
“There will be a time in the future where people are going to know everything about subjects like that, which are very complex subjects for people,” said Trump.