Why the FDA may be dragging out its politicized review of the abortion pill

Following a disinformation campaign seeded by anti-abortion groups that want to end telemedicine access to the abortion drug mifepristone, Trump administration officials have told lawmakers for months that they would review safety data for the pills. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary confirmed in a mid-September letter that such a review was underway.

The reporting suggests the Trump administration is trying to limit GOP electoral losses by giving voters a false sense of security about abortion access.

However, Bloomberg, citing multiple people familiar with the matter, published an explosive story alleging that Makary personally intervened to slow-walk the politicized safety review until after the 2026 midterm elections. Makary reportedly told agency officials to delay the review, the outcome of which would likely make the medication much harder to get. The reporting suggests the Trump administration is trying to limit GOP electoral losses as much as possible by giving voters a false sense of security about abortion access.

MS NOW has not independently verified Bloomberg’s report.

According to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 63% of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases and, by a margin of more than 2-to-1, respondents believed that medication abortion should be legal. Mifepristone is typically used alongside a second medication, misoprostol, to end an early pregnancy, and the two-drug combination is also used to manage miscarriages.

The administration denied Bloomberg’s report and said that scientific reviews, by their nature, are slow. “Assertions that the FDA is slow walking this review for political purposes are baseless,” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon told the outlet. “FDA’s comprehensive scientific reviews take the time necessary to get the science right.”

Responding to the Bloomberg report, Makary told The Daily Signal, that he couldn’t predict the “results or the timeline” of the review. He said, “The shutdown was a little bit of a setback in that, but we’re gonna do it and whenever the results are available, we’re gonna make them public.”

The government’s explanation that it couldn’t do this purported review faster is hard to accept. The FDA moved quickly when, without evidence, it warned consumers about a “possible link” between prenatal acetaminophen use and autism. Makary even helped announce the administration’s baseless position on acetaminophen. That suggests that when the administration wants to engage in some fact-free scaremongering about a medication, it can do so expeditiously.

That’s why it’s reasonable to assume that politics are playing a role in the agency being much more careful with mifepristone than with Tylenol — even as we acknowledge that a label change and an unnecessary public warnings about an over-the-counter pain reliever are quite different from rolling back access to a common, discreet method of abortion care that’s used by people in all 50 states.

After the Bloomberg story ran, the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called for Makary to be fired.

After the Bloomberg story ran, the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America called for Makary to be fired. That’s significant. SBA previously spearheaded letter-writing campaigns that led to more than 220 members of Congress urging the FDA to end telemedicine access to mifepristone.

But Republicans can’t ignore the political pressure from the opposite direction. They have long been worried about a House wipeout in the midterms and are becoming increasingly concerned about margins in the Senate. Plus, President Donald Trump’s approval rating has sunk to the lowest point of his second term so far. Abortion access, however, remains popular.

As you likely already know, a safety review of mifepristone is unnecessary: More than 100 studies have found that it’s a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.

In response to the Bloomberg story, Planned Parenthood Action Fund President and CEO Alexis McGill Johnson said in a statement that the Trump administration’s “opposition to mifepristone isn’t rooted in science, but in their desire to strip people of their ability to make their own decisions about their bodies, lives, and futures.”

Restricting access to the drug nationwide was a key goal in Project 2025, which called on the next Republican administration to, at a minimum, end telemedicine prescriptions for abortion pills — if not revoke FDA approval entirely. (Notably, lawmakers latched on to a junk science paper to press the agency for restrictions; the paper was released by the far-right Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was involved in the drafting of Project 2025.)

Anti-abortion groups hoped that the end of Roe v. Wade would lead to fewer abortions, but the availability of mifepristone by mail has contributed to an increase in the number of abortions, a fact that has infuriated conservatives who claim they can’t adequately enforce their bans.

The FDA under President Joe Biden allowed prescriptions for mifepristone through telehealth for the first time in 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before permanently allowing it in 2023. Then eight states responded to the fall of Roe by passing so-called shield laws that protect telehealth providers from criminal or civil investigations if they prescribe abortion pills to people in states with bans.

Backers of the mifepristone review want to restore unnecessary in-person appointments, which would end the telemedicine prescriptions that now account for more than a quarter of all abortions in the U.S. SBA president Marjorie Dannenfelser said in a release that the FDA needs a commissioner who “will immediately reinstate in-person dispensing as it existed under President Trump’s first term and immediately conduct a comprehensive study.” Dannenfelser added that Makary was “severely undermining” the anti-abortion credentials of Trump and Vice President JD Vance, namely “their position that states should have the right to enact and enforce pro-life protections.”

The changes that conservative groups want would restrict abortion access even in states where it is a right codified in state constitutions.

However, the changes that conservative groups want would apply nationwide, meaning they would restrict abortion access even in states where it remains broadly legal, or is a right codified in state constitutions. So people in California, New York and elsewhere would be unable to get mifepristone prescribed via telehealth and would be forced to go to a shrinking number of clinics to get it. That outcome would not be “leaving abortion to the states,” as Trump asserted on the campaign trail.

Rolling back abortion access would be deeply unpopular, so you can understand why Republican officials reportedly don’t want to touch this issue during the next 11 months. I previously wrote that this administration has shown that it will ignore scientific evidence to advance its own narratives, but apparently not when control of Congress is at stake.

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