USA – The Abortion Pill Is Safe. Scientists Fear an FDA Investigation Will Ignore Science

Some scientists are concerned that the Trump administration will use “junk science” when reviewing mifepristone’s safety record

October 30, 2025
By Liz Szabo

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., recently announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will launch a review of the safety of the abortion pill, mifepristone. Health researchers say they’re concerned that the review will be politicized and based on flawed reports. More than 100 studies published over the past few decades have shown that the drug, which was approved by the FDA in 2000, is safe and effective at ending a pregnancy.

Given Kennedy’s history of misrepresenting scientific evidence about vaccines, autism and Tylenol, some scientists say they worry that the health secretary will base the FDA report on unreliable sources.

Continued: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fda-is-investigating-the-abortion-pill-mifepristone-despite-decades-of/

Volunteers rush to send abortion pills to US women in need as ‘war between the states’ looms

Massachusetts abortion project pushes for access across country as controversial shield laws are put to legal test
Carter Sherman
Sat 26 Apr 2025
Each of the volunteers – five women and one man – have a unique role in the assembly line. One volunteer drops slim, orange boxes of mifepristone, the first drug typically used in a medication abortion, into the envelopes, while another volunteer adds green-capped bottles of the second drug, misoprostol. A few volunteers add brochures on topics such as how to use abortion pills or what to do if a woman suspects she has an ectopic pregnancy. Finally, one volunteer drops small purple cards into each envelope. They all bear the same handwritten message: “We wish you the best.” The cards are signed with a swooping heart and a nondescript name: “the Map”, or the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/26/abortion-clinic-pills-shield-laws

USA – How idea of charging women with murder infiltrated the anti-abortion movement

‘Abolitionists’ have migrated out of the fringes and moved toward the center of movement alongside Republicans’ penchant for punishment

Carter Sherman
Wed 23 Apr 2025

So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.

Once seen as politically toxic, this kind of legislation has become more popular in the years since Roe v Wade fell, erasing the national right to abortion. This likely comes as no surprise to Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law and one of the foremost commentators on the US abortion wars. The anti-abortion movement, she writes in her new book Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction, has really “always been a fetal-personhood movement” – one that is so emboldened, it is increasingly unconcerned with public opinion or even democratic norms.

Continued; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/23/anti-abortion-fetal-personhood

Does a Fetus Have Constitutional Rights?

“Personhood,” by Mary Ziegler, is a field guide to the seemingly boundless tactical resourcefulness of the anti-abortion movement.

By Margaret Talbot
April 14, 2025

In the first two years after the Supreme Court eliminated the constitutional right to abortion, the number of abortions performed annually in the United States went up. On the face of it, this might seem perplexing. After all, many states seized the opportunity presented by the Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to enact daunting new restrictions on abortion: twelve adopted near-total bans, and four more imposed gestational limits of six weeks, a point at which many people may not yet realize they are pregnant. Yet, suddenly, the U.S. was seeing an increase in abortions—from about nine hundred and thirty thousand in 2020 to more than a million in 2023. The best explanation for this apparent paradox was that providers and activists in states where abortion was still accessible devoted considerable energy and resources into making it more so. This was especially true for medication abortions provided via telehealth. In December, 2021, the F.D.A. had lifted its requirement that mifepristone be prescribed in person; the number of virtual clinics, which assess a patient’s eligibility online or by phone, and mail out the medications, proliferated.

Continued: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/21/personhood-mary-ziegler-book-review

USA – Lawmakers Are Trying to Hold Crisis Pregnancy Centers to Account

Post-Dobbs, the GOP has given them millions in taxpayer dollars.

Laura C. Morel, Mother Jones
April 10, 2025

Last month, during an Indiana state legislative hearing, Republican Sen. Jeff Raatz from Richmond, a small city in the eastern part of the state, discussed a resolution he filed declaring that the state’s General Assembly “strongly supports pregnancy care centers in their unique, positive contributions to the individual lives of women, men, and babies—both born and unborn,” the Indiana Capital Chronicle reported. “We have hospitals in rural Indiana that have no OB-GYNs,” Raatz said during the session. “Why not have an innocent individual stand alongside someone and help them make decisions and connect them with resources?” Abortion is banned in Indiana with limited exceptions.

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/04/lawmakers-are-trying-to-hold-crisis-pregnancy-centers-to-account/

A new Texas bill is coming after online abortion pills

The 43-page measure, introduced Friday, may be the most meaningful attempt this year to block the ordering and mailing of medication abortion.

March 14, 2025

Republican state legislators unveiled a new effort on Friday to derail the health care network that has helped people in Texas continue accessing abortion years after the Lone Star State banned the procedure.

The 43-page bill targets tech companies that allow patients to order abortion pills online and nonprofit funds that help them travel out of state for care and gives new power to the state’s attorney general to prosecute abortion providers. Introduced by influential state legislators in the state’s House and Senate and backed by Texas Right to Life, a leading anti-abortion group, this is the most sweeping abortion bill introduced in the state since the fall of Roe v. Wade almost three years ago.

Continued: https://19thnews.org/2025/03/texas-bill-abortion-pills/

Anti-abortion groups claim they don’t want to punish women. New lawsuits say otherwise.

Lawsuits by multiple red states push to allow employers to penalize women who take time off to seek an abortion or deal with related medical complications.

Feb. 26, 2025
By Mary Ziegler, professor at the UC Davis School of Law

The antiabortion movement is grappling with an internal divide about whether women should be punished for abortion, as a growing number of state legislatures consider personhood bills authorizing the punishment of abortion seekers. But an ongoing struggle to deny accommodations for pregnant workers shows the two sides in this civil war might not be so far apart. Both groups seem to agree employers should be allowed to penalize workers who get abortions.

Well before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the nation’s most powerful antiabortion groups denounced the idea of punishing women for abortion. When then-candidate Donald Trump said in 2016 that women deserved “some form of punishment” for abortion, leading antiabortion activists lambasted him. Movement leaders stressed that prosecutors had rarely targeted women in the years before Roe and pledged that nothing would change when abortion was once again a crime. The bans implemented after the Dobbs ruling, such as the trigger laws that went into effect immediately after Roe’s demise, often contained exemptions for pregnant patients.

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/abortion-pregnant-workers-state-lawsuits-texas-rcna193892

26.02.2025

Commentary

abortion abolitionists

Equal Employment Opportunity Commission

Mary Ziegler

personhood bills

Pregnant Worker Fairness Act

punishing women for abortion

USA – Anti-Abortion Activists See Their Moon-Shot Goal Within Reach

And we’re already experiencing the consequences.

By Mary Ziegler
Feb 14, 2025

In 2022 the Louisiana Legislature became the first to advance a bill to criminalize abortion seekers. While conservative states often punish women for pregnancy-related conduct, as the group Pregnancy Justice documents, jurisdictions that ban abortion have been careful to stress that they don’t punish women for abortion itself. And when Louisiana came close to doing that, the most powerful national anti-abortion organizations moved to kill the bill, arguing that the movement was united in viewing women as victims, not perpetrators, of abortion.

That might have been it: The movement’s powers that be had spoken, and the case was closed. But this legislative session has already seen a wave of bills authorizing the punishment of abortion patients, proposed by so-called abortion abolitionists, who argue that their bills are the only way for the anti-abortion movement to be logically consistent, as well as morally (and biblically) justified.

Continued; https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/anti-abortion-legislation-fetal-personhood.html

New Research Finds Potential Alternative to Abortion Pill Mifepristone

The research could further complicate the polarized politics of abortion because the drug in the study is the key ingredient in a pill used for emergency contraception.

By Pam Belluck and Emily Bazelon
Jan. 23, 2025

A new study suggests a possible alternative to the abortion pill mifepristone, a drug that continues to be a target of lawsuits and legislation from abortion opponents.

But the potential substitute could further complicate the politics of reproductive health because it is also the key ingredient in a contraceptive morning-after pill.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/23/health/abortion-pill-ella.html

Abortion pills by mail surge despite Texas’ bans. How long can it last? | Opinion

Bridget Grumet, Austin American-Statesman
Jan 16 , 2025

NEWARK, DELAWARE — The large cardboard box in Debra Lynch’s living room contained enough pills for 162 medication abortions. Last summer, such a shipment would last a month. Then she needed to reorder every two weeks. Now she goes through a box like this every week.

“We’re mailing a lot to Texas,” said Jay Lynch, who handles most of the packaging and postage for Her Safe Harbor, an abortion-drug-by-mail service spearheaded by his wife.
Joe Pojman, the founder and executive director of the Texas Alliance for Life
Continued: https://www.statesman.com/story/opinion/columns/2025/01/16/abortion-pill-texas-ban-law-mifepristone-misoprostol-plan-c-pills/77332833007/