Missouri Senator Josh Hawley Introduces Bill To Ban Abortion Pill
The Republican Senator says the abortion drug, which is safer than Viagra, has “devastating health effects.”
It’s no secret that Project 2025 and the Republican party are coming for reproductive rights. They’ve been attacking abortion rights on all fronts, from trying to shut down clinics, to trying to overturn laws, to battling it out in the courts. While they’ve had some big wins — such as overturning Roe V. Wade in 2022 — they’ve also had trouble getting traction in other areas, such as banning abortion drugs, largely due to the fact that the majority of Americans are pro choice.
Now, conservatives are working hard to ban mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in the “abortion pill” used in medical abortions. Their newest effort is spearheaded by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who has introduced a bill that would ban the drug from being administered and strip it of approval by the Food & Drug Administration.
“We’ve known for years that mifepristone is risky, but it’s really just in the last few years that we’ve learned this drug is inherently dangerous and it’s inherently prone to abuse,” Hawley said during a news conference announcing the bill.
Hawley bases his opinion about the “death pill” as he has called it, on a 2025 study of mifepristone that was conducted by conservative think tank, the Ethics and Public Policy Center. The report, which was funded by the right, found that 11% of people taking the drug suffered “serious adverse effects.” But closer inspection has found that the study hid some of its data, was not peer-reviewed, and has a very vague and broad definition of what a “serious adverse effect” is.
Other than this isolated piece of research, however, the drug has been found to be incredibly safe — safer than other popular drugs, among them penicillin and Viagra. It has a success rate of up to 98 percent for pregnancies up to eight weeks and is 14 times safer than childbirth. It was initially approved by the FDA in 2000 and was approved to be prescribed via telehealth in 2020.
In 2024, a group of conservative doctors attempted to ban the drug via the Supreme Court — an effort that involved Hawley’s wife, who is a lawyer. The judges unanimously declined to take mifepristone off the market.
More recently, RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, has said that the FDA will review the safety of the drug in light of recent studies — again citing the single study conducted by the conservative think tank.
If passed, the legislation brought to Congress by Hawley would immediately ban the drug in the United States.
