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The Trump admin's quiet (but deadly) attack on repro rights
They're doctoring science and changing policy to make pregnancy more dangerous.
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For the first few months of 2025, the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress were pretty thoroughly occupied with tearing the federal government down to the studs and selling the pieces for scrap. That’s really the only reason that the predictable spate of attacks on abortion didn’t start in earnest until a few weeks ago.
But now, with a majority in both houses of Congress, an extremely pliable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court, and a shattered administrative state, conservatives are targeting abortion at the national level. Guess we’ve given up on that whole “we don’t want to ban abortion, we just want to return it to the states” thing that anti-choicers pretended at for so long.
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First up, Sen. Josh Hawley. Hawley has always been forthright about his hardline anti-choice views. But somehow, as the 2024 election drew nearer, Hawley started saying he wouldn’t support a national ban. It was a laughably transparent attempt to align himself with Donald Trump’s laughably transparent attempt at pretending he was opposed to a nationwide ban.
Now, Hawley is savvy enough not to get out ahead of the White House on this, as right now, Trump doesn’t seem to have an appetite for muscling a ban through. Trump’s vagueness about abortion is deliberate. He is fully aware that the majority of people, even in red states, support abortion rights, support that has only increased since the Supreme Court overturned Roe. He’s equally aware, though, that he owes much of his political success to hardline anti-choice activists, many of whom are now unhappy he isn’t ending abortion nationwide.
But just because Trump senses that keeping mum on a national ban is best at the moment doesn’t mean he won’t let people like Hawley propose things that radically restrict access to abortion.
So, Hawley is going after mifepristone. In 2023, medication abortions made up 63 percent of all abortions in the country. Making mifepristone unavailable nationwide would radically decrease the availability of abortion. It would ensure, even in blue states, that abortions become much harder to obtain.
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The problem for Hawley and his fellow anti-choicers is that mifepristone is extremely safe. From 2000, when mifepristone was first approved for medication abortions by the Food and Drug Administration, through 2022, there were 32 deaths from taking mifepristone for a medication abortion. Not 32 per year — 32 total in 22 years, during which there were 5.9 million medication abortions. During that same period, there were 4,218 adverse events of any kind, including 1,049 hospitalizations, 604 incidents of blood loss requiring a transfusion, and 418 infections, 75 of which were severe.
Again, that’s out of 5.9 million cases, meaning about .07 percent of all medication abortions resulted in an adverse medical event as defined by the FDA. But Hawley lucked out when Trump tapped the feckless Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to run the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s anti-science bent is easily exploited, so Hawley had a bogus medical study all teed up to dangle in front of Kennedy like a shiny object in front of a toddler to try to force the FDA to reconsider its approval of a safe drug with decades of research behind it.
This purported study found that a staggering one in 10 people experienced a serious adverse event. Jezebel has a thorough explanation of how what Hawley is pushing bears little resemblance to actual medical research. In brief, real scientific studies appear in real journals, not on the website for the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a sort of all-purpose conservative grievance website. Real scientific studies name all authors and researchers, rather than vaguely mentioning an anonymous multidisciplinary team. Real scientific studies are peer-reviewed by other experts in the field. Real scientific studies have clear criteria to show who was included in the study and why.
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Hawley knows full well that this is not an actual study. It’s a polemic with political conclusions, not scientific ones. The same day it came out, Hawley sent a letter to Marty Makary, Trump’s pick to lead the FDA, breathlessly declaring that it is time to “revisit and restore the FDA’s longstanding safety measures” about mifepristone. And though this isn’t really the point, you can apparently only find Makary’s letter to Hawley announcing the FDA’s review on Hawley’s X account, rather than a more normal place like the