Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that the Food and Drug Administration will do a new review of the abortion pill mifepristone.
The review will look at how safe and effective the drug is. Mifepristone is used with another medication called misoprostol to end early pregnancies. Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary sent a letter on September 19 to 22 Republican attorneys general to tell them about this decision.
According to MSNBC, the letter said that HHS is looking at the evidence to see if mifepristone rules need to change. This happened after nearly two dozen Republican state officials asked HHS in July to bring back older limits on the drug. These limits would make people come to the doctor’s office multiple times and only allow the pill to be used up to seven weeks of pregnancy instead of 10 weeks.
What Kennedy and Makary are doing now looks a lot like what they just did with acetaminophen. Days before talking about the abortion pill review, they warned pregnant women about taking Tylenol and started changing its safety label using weak evidence. The letter about mifepristone uses research from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that helped write Project 2025. The EPPC paper was never checked by other scientists and seems to blow out of proportion what it calls serious side effects from the abortion pill.
Medical experts say more than 100 studies already prove mifepristone is safe
More than 100 studies have already shown that mifepristone is safe for ending pregnancies. The FDA first approved the drug in 2000 after doing a thorough review. Since then, regular checkups have not found new safety problems. In 2016, the FDA expanded its approval to let people use mifepristone through 10 weeks of pregnancy after looking at safety information.
Mifepristone is safe and has been used effectively for decades. RFK’s “review” is just a step to limit abortion care access.
— Pramila Jayapal (@PramilaJayapal) September 28, 2025
Abortion is health care and health care is a right.
The EPPC study calls normal things complications. It says needing a clinic visit to finish an abortion is a problem, even though doctors tell patients ahead of time that the pills don’t work about 3% to 4% of the time. The paper also lists ectopic pregnancies as a serious problem, even though mifepristone does not cause these and is not used to treat them.
Dr. Stella Dantas, former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told AFP that the paper twists data to push a false idea that medication abortion is not safe. Medical groups still support mifepristone as safe. More than 7.5 million women in the United States have used the drug since it was approved, according to the ACLU. Kennedy has faced criticism for his controversial health positions throughout his time as health secretary.
Nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the United States in 2023 were done with pills. By the end of 2024, 1 in 4 abortions were done with pills through telehealth. Half of those medication abortions were given by doctors in eight states with shield laws. These laws let abortion providers treat telehealth patients in other states. For many patients in states where abortion is now illegal after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, telemedicine is the only way to access abortion services.
