RFK Jr. Spoke Up About The Abortion Pill & Hinted It Might Not Be Around For Long

We’ve long known that the conservative right is working hard to take bodily autonomy away from women even though the majority of Americans believe in abortion rights. Up to this point, Republicans have been largely waging their war against choice in courtrooms, but now it seems that they are now going to use federal agencies, like the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Health and Human Services (HHS) to limit access to abortion medications — starting with with abortion drug mifepristone.

On Thursday, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was interrogated by the U.S. Senate judiciary committee on a number of medical topics concerning the country. During the heated discussion, RFK mentioned abortion access and abortion medication for the first time since he took office in February.

“We’re getting data in all the time,” he said in reply to a question poised by Republican Senator James Lankford about the abortion pill. “New data that we’re reviewing. And we know that during the Biden administration, they actually twisted the data to bury one of the safety signals, a very high safety signal, around 11%. We’re gonna make sure that doesn’t happen any more.”

RFK was referring to a paper published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a partisan, conservative think tank. The paper found that almost 11% of women suffer from sepsis and hemorrhaging within 45 days of taking mifepristone.

While this sounds concerning, the paper is not peer-reviewed (a gold standard in the medical study space) and was never published in a medical journal (like most valid studies are). Also, many medical professionals have spoken up about the flaws in the study, such as the fact that it included people with ectopic pregnancies.

In addition, a huge, huge volume of studies over many years have found mifepristone to be safe and effective; the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) approved it for use 25 years ago. One recent study even found that the abortion pill is safer than other very common prescription drugs, including penicillin and Viagra. Further, the American Medical Association found that taking mifepristone off the market would create a significant amount of harm to patients across the country, especially marginalized groups.

The last time RFK, Jr. spoke on this topic was during his confirmation hearing at the beginning of the year.

“President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone,” Kennedy said at the time. “He has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it. Whatever he does, I will implement those policies.”

Medication abortions, the majority of which involve mifepristone, account for two-thirds of all abortions in the United States. Banning Mifepristone is a key goal of Project 2025.