USA – ‘Rolling Thunder’: Inside conservatives’ strategy to curb abortion pill access

Abortion opponents hope a new report will spur the GOP to ban abortion pills and defund Planned Parenthood.

By Alice Miranda Ollstein
May 7, 2025

The nation’s most influential anti-abortion groups have a new plan to roll back access to the procedure for millions of Americans in what they’re calling the “biggest opportunity for the pro-life movement” since toppling Roe v. Wade.

The effort, which the groups have privately named “Rolling Thunder,” is the movement’s first concerted attempt under the second Trump administration to target abortion pills, and aims to convince the FDA, Congress and courts to crack down on their use.

Continued: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/07/anti-abortion-pill-gameplan-rolling-thunder-00331933

07.05.2025

Commentary

abortion pills

American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs

Americans United for Life

Angela Vasquez-Giroux

anti-choice anti-science

anti-choice cruelty

anti-choice dishonesty

anti-choice extremism

anti-choice junk science

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misogyny

Brittni Frederiksen

Colson Center for Christian Worldview

Dr. Christina Francis

Ethics and Public Policy Center

FDA

Food and Drug Administration

Marjorie Dannenfelser

Marty Makary

mifepristone

Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood Action Fund

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RollingThunder

Ryan Anderson

safety of abortion pills

Students for Life

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America

United States

Activism

Anti-choice

USA – The Bad Data Backing Josh Hawley’s Attack on Abortion Pills

A new study being used to call for mifepristone restrictions relies on vague and dubious definitions of drug-related complications.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown
May 5, 2025

The abortion pill mifepristone "is not safe and effective," argue the authors of a new study that uses insurance claim data to examine adverse reactions to the pill. They claim to have found a "serious adverse event" rate of 10.93 percent, and they say this finding justifies renewed restrictions on mifepristone.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) seems to agree. The day the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) released its new mifepristone study, Hawley wrote to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) chief Marty Makary, urging the commissioner to "follow this new data and take all appropriate action to restore critical safeguards on the use of mifepristone."

Continued: https://reason.com/2025/05/05/the-bad-data-backing-josh-hawleys-attack-on-abortion-pills/

05.05.2025

Commentary

abortion pills

anti-choice deception

anti-choice hypocrisy

anti-choice lies

anti-choice misogyny

Food and Drug Administration

Josh Hawley

Marty Makary

misoprostol

safety of abortion pills

United States

Anti-choice

Health

USA – The Bogus ‘Category 5 Hurricane’ Hitting the Abortion Pill

By Ross Pomeroy
May 2, 2025

A new report from the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a religious conservative think tank, is being hailed amongst right-wingers as “the statistical equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry.”

According to the report, the rate of serious adverse events amongst women who used mifepristone to medically induce an abortion is not 0.5 percent, but rather 11 percent. Mifepristone, which blocks the hormone progesterone (needed for a pregnancy to continue), is commonly used with the ulcer prevention drug misoprostol to safely and effectively end pregnancies at fewer than ten weeks gestation.
Some on the right are using the report to cudgel FDA Commissioner Martin Makary to restrict or even ban the use of mifepristone. Makary last week said he has “no plans to take action” to restrict the availability of mifepristone. He did, however, leave the door open to take action if the data changed.

Continued: https://www.splinter.com/the-bogus-category-5-hurricane-hitting-the-abortion-pill

The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill

Mifepristone took longer to get approved than most drugs—but not because it was unsafe.

Nina Martin, Mother Jones
Feb 7, 2025

At his Senate confirmation hearings to head the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surprised no one by admitting that he planned to order a new review of the safety of abortion pills. While Kennedy claimed that President Donald Trump has not taken a position—yet—on medication abortion, “he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll ask [agencies] to do that.”

This, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion groups have been pushing for. Since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, abortion opponents have been ramping up unfounded claims that mifepristone and misoprostol are dangerous. Their efforts have included a flurry of letters to the new administration, explicit directives in the far right’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, and a barrage of ever-more-extreme lawsuits and state bills.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/02/abortion-pill-forgotten-history-attacks-mifepristone-ru486-anti-abortion-extremists-new-book/

07.02.2025

Commentary

abortion pills

Abortion Pills: US History and Politics

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Feminist Majority Foundation

Food and Drug Administration

manual vacuum aspiration

Reproductive Health Technologies Project

Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies

Roussel-Uclaf

RU-486

Searle

Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Company

shield laws

telehealth abortion

telehealth clinics

telemedicine abortion

USA – Reproductive rights and justice groups plan for Trump’s return

By: Sofia Resnick
January 18, 2025

In the days following President-elect Donald Trump’s win last November, a national abortion-assistance hotline was being inundated with calls. “They were confused about whether abortion was even still legal in the country, because they have heard the rhetoric around Trump’s position on abortion,” said Brittany Fonteno, the president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation.

The association of abortion providers runs what Fonteno says is the largest financial assistance program for people seeking abortions and is among the many groups preparing for another potentially destabilizing shift in U.S. reproductive health policy after Trump takes office Monday.

Continued: https://lailluminator.com/2025/01/18/abortion-trump-2/

USA – Some states on track to restore abortion access, while others push for fetal rights in 2025

By: Sofia Resnick and Kelcie Moseley-Morris
January 2, 2025

Heading into the third year since Roe v. Wade was overturned, states will continue to introduce and consider legislation to expand or restrict access to reproductive health care and abortion as legislative sessions begin. In anticipation of President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January, states with broad reproductive rights protections have introduced bills to shield patients and doctors if the incoming Republican administration overturns protections implemented under President Joe Biden. States with strict bans, meanwhile, have started floating fetal personhood bans, abortion pill punishments and other restrictions.

Most legislatures will convene during the second week in January or later and adjourn midway through the year.

Continued: https://ncnewsline.com/2025/01/02/some-states-on-track-to-restore-abortion-access-while-others-push-for-fetal-rights-in-2025/

Abortion Prepping for the Trump Era

Preserving access to Plan B, misoprostol, and more isn’t just about stockpiling doses. It’s about building circles of trust.

Melissa Gira Grant
December 30, 2024

Trump’s return to the White House, accompanied by allies deeply hostile to anything related to reproductive and sexual health and rights, has sparked panic. As in late 2016 during the first Trump transition period, part of the problem is not knowing how far things could go. Checklists and tips are again circulating online, urging people to update the gender listed on government-issued identity documents, get an emergency supply of birth control pills or hormones, assemble an emergency folder of health documentation, buy a stash of Plan B, get an IUD before Inauguration Day. With access not only to abortion medication or hormones threatened but also a wide array of other drugs and vaccines, discourse over stockpiling medication—in case it becomes hard to access or is even taken off the market by a cowed Food and Drug Administration—has escalated, and in a way that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/189502/abortion-trump-era-plan-b-misoprostol

USA -Why abortions rose after Roe was overturned

Contrary to many predictions, abortions did not decline nationally after the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision. Here's what's behind the trend.

Nov. 26, 2024
By Aria Bendix

It seemed only logical after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade that abortion rates would go down and births would go up. Instead, the opposite happened: Abortions went up last year and the country’s fertility rate hit a historic low.

More than 1 million abortions were recorded in the United States in 2023 — the highest in a decade, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion access. So far this year, abortion rates have remained about the same as in the last six months of 2023, preliminary data show.

Continued: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/abortions-rose-roe-overturned-why-rcna181094

26.11.2024

Commentary

abortion by mail

Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access

abortion pills

Aid Access

Alliance Defending Freedom

American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs

Center for Reproductive Rights

Comstock Act

Diana Greene Foster

Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization

Dr. Amy Whitaker

Dr. Christina Francis

Dr. Remy Coeytaux

Erik Baptist

Florida Access Network

Food and Drug Administration

Guttmacher Institute

Julie Kay

Karoline Leavitt

Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project

Matthew Kacsmaryk

medication abortion

mifepristone

National Right to Life

Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro

telemedicine abortion

The Brigid Alliance

traveling for abortion

USA – Why Smashing the Administrative State Is a Disaster for Reproductive Rights

The latest Supreme Court rulings are already being weaponized against gender identity. Abortion and birth control are next.

NINA MARTIN, Mother Jones
July 10, 2024

It turns out the most consequential reproductive rights case before the Supreme Court this past term—arguably, the most significant since the overturn of Roe v. Wade—wasn’t the religious right’s attack on the abortion drug mifepristone, or the battle over whether the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act requires hospitals to provide emergency abortions in states with strict bans. It was a fight over who should pay to monitor commercial fishing boats so they don’t deplete the herring population off the Atlantic coast.

Reproductive health and gender equality advocates are just beginning to digest the sweeping implications of the ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, in which the court’s conservative supermajority overturned a 40-year-old cornerstone of US administrative law known as “Chevron deference.” In doing so, the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies to issue regulations on everything from financial markets to industrial pollution to drug pricing to workplace safety.

And abortion. And birth control. And trans equality. And pregnant workers’ rights.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/why-smashing-the-administrative-state-is-a-disaster-for-reproductive-rights/

10.07.2024

Commentary

Affordable Care Act

Alliance Defending Freedom

Becket Fund for Religious Liberty

Chevron deference

Chevron doctrine

Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council

Corner Post decision

Corner Post v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System

Democracy Forward

emergency abortion care

EMTALA

Eric Rassbach

Food and Drug Administration

Heritage Foundation

Julie Marie Blake

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

Lisa Heinzerling

Loper Bright decision

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerrce

Mary Ziegler

mifepristone case

National Partnership for Women and Families

Pregnant Workers Fairness Act

USA / Global – Second Trimester Taboo

Abortion pills are more important than ever, and safe far later than most people know

By Cecilia Nowell
Illustrations by Zhenya Oliinyk
Lux Magazine, June(?) issue

In a small Texas courtroom last spring, Erik Baptist, senior counsel for the conservative group Alliance Defending Freedom, insisted that the Food and Drug Administration had been reckless when it approved the abortion pill mifepristone for use before seven weeks of pregnancy in 2000, and then, in 2016, for up to 10 weeks.

The judge agreed, suspending the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of two pills used in the typical protocol for medication abortions in the U.S. The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which is expected to rule this summer on whether to uphold the suspension or otherwise restrict the use of mifepristone.

Continued: https://lux-magazine.com/article/second-trimester/