WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Pro-life U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said this week the Trump administration is delivering “zero” progress regarding its promised review of abortion pill safety data on which pro-lifers have been pinning their hopes of a policy change for more than eight months.
President Donald Trump established a consistently pro-life record in his first term, which ended with a hotly disputed loss to Joe Biden in 2020, but began to turn after the 2022 midterm elections in which he attempted to blame the abortion issue for GOP underperformance. During his 2024 run, he changed further still, ruling out a federal abortion ban in favor of leaving the issue to the states, and changing the Republican Party platform’s longstanding pro-life language to reflect that preference.
He also declared he would not reverse former President Joe Biden’s refusal to enforce federal law against mailing abortion pills across state lines despite the tactic undermining state pro-life laws. Pro-lifers were given hope in May 2025 that the White House’s position might change when U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (another formerly pro-abortion figure who moderated during his own presidential bid) promised a “complete review” of the medical risks of abortion pills, though no conclusions or timetable have since been announced.
Last December, many pro-life leaders called for the firing of U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary over a Bloomberg report that allegedly “behind the scenes, he told agency officials to delay the safety review” until “after the midterm elections,” according to unnamed “people familiar with the discussions.”
In response to congressional inquiries about the agency’s silence, the FDA has repeatedly assured them the review is ongoing, and Makary insisted his agency was simply in the middle of “routine steps in robust data analysis (…) I’m committed to doing this the right way.”
Now, the Washington Stand reported that a group of senators held a private meeting with Makary on Tuesday, from which Hawley walked away pessimistic. “I think that this safety study is a dead end,” he said. “I just think that FDA is not serious about it. I don’t think that they’re proceeding with any sense of urgency whatsoever.
“I can tell you (that this briefing) was behind closed doors, which says a lot,” he later told the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins. “It doesn’t matter what your state’s laws are, it doesn’t matter if the voters of your state have said, ‘We want to protect life,’ this drug gets mailed in to every state in the union, often coming from overseas. You can get it on a website, frequently free of charge. This is where the fight to protect life is. Right now, it’s about mifepristone.”
“I have asked repeatedly in public letters written to the FDA, ‘Have you started the study? When are you starting the study? When will it be done?’ I’ve gotten zero answers from them. Zilch. Zero,” Hawley declared. “There’s been public reporting in the news that the FDA has not even started the study yet.… I don’t know that this is even underway. And I just think at this point, this study, it’s vital – it should be done (…) in the meantime, abortions in this country are increasing. There are more abortions now than when Roe was the law of the land. And that’s because of chemical abortion.”
“I told him this to (Makary’s) face, I said, ‘You need to go back to President Trump’s policies’” from his first term, Hawley said. “He promised me he would do a serious review of it. But I just don’t think that that review is even underway. All I can say is we’ve got to do something to start protecting life in a serious way.”
Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana agreed, calling “the lack of progress on HHS and FDA’s promised safety study on these dangerous drugs” “disappointing” and “moving too slowly.”
A Q&A on the FDA’s website says, “As of February 2026, the FDA continues to work on the collection of the robust and timely data that is necessary for a well-controlled study with adequate statistical power. The next steps of the mifepristone safety study will be data exploration, evaluation of data integrity, and implementation of the analyses, validation, and peer-review. Once the FDA finishes its analysis of the data, the agency will decide whether to make substantive changes to the REMS. If the FDA determines that changes to the REMS are warranted, then the agency will take appropriate action.”
“The agency is taking care to do this study properly and in the right way,” the document claims. “We are planning to complete the study as soon as possible while ensuring we are not cutting any corners from a scientific research standpoint. In academia, studies like these, including the appropriate steps described above, often take approximately a year or more to conduct. The current agency plan is to have this study done sooner than that timeframe.”
The FDA’s lack of visible progress is particularly frustrating for pro-lifers in light of the Trump administration asking a federal court last month not to grant Louisiana’s legal challenge of the Biden abortion-pill rules, arguing it would “short circuit” the FDA review, effectively forcing pro-life policymakers across the country to wait indefinitely.
Many pro-lifers argue that such a review is unnecessary to take action, highlighting an April analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) that concluded almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, plus similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation as part of a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.
Mail-order abortion pills have become arguably the abortion lobby’s most important tool for perpetuating abortion-on-demand, as it makes chemical abortions even in pro-life states extremely difficult to prevent.
Nevertheless, Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s most recent annual report revealed that, almost two years (as of April 2024) after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed direct abortion bans to be enforced for the first time in half a century, the nation’s largest abortion chain still operated almost 600 facilities nationwide, through which it committed 392,715 in the most recent reporting period. According to Lozier Institute professor Michael New, that is a “record number of abortions for the organization and represents approximately 40 percent of the abortions performed in the United States.”