In case you missed it during today’s fiery Senate Finance Committee hearing, RFK Jr. doubled down on false, right-wing claims that data on Mifepristone was “twisted,” while citing a flawed study that questioned the safety of the medicine.
It’s the latest evidence that RFK Jr. is looking for ways to justify a Mifepristone ban and further restrict abortion rights for millions of women nationwide.
Learn more about RFK Jr.’s suggestion that mifepristone is unsafe:
- The US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr has suggested that Biden-era regulations expanding access to abortion pills could be rolled back because the Biden administration had “twisted the data” behind the pills.
- Kennedy did not back up the accusation, which runs counter to more than three decades of research. More than 100 studies, conducted across dozens of countries, have found that mifepristone and misoprostol, the abortion pills typically used in the United States, are a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.
- The comment came when James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, asked Kennedy whether the Trump administration intended to reverse the Biden-era changes to access to mifepristone. In 2016 and 2021, the FDA rewrote its regulations of the drug to allow healthcare providers other than doctors to prescribe it and to make it easier for patients to receive mifepristone through telemedicine.
- “You’d said there would be a review on that, just to be able to look at it, make sure we’re following all safety protocols,” Lankford said. “Do you know a timing on that review?” “I can’t give you an exact timing,” Kennedy said, adding that he talked to FDA commissioner Marty Makary about the issue.
- “We’re getting data in all the time. 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%,” Kennedy said. “We’re gonna make sure that doesn’t happen any more.”
- Kennedy appeared to be referring to an analysis published in an April paper by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing thinktank, which claimed almost 11% of women experience sepsis, hemorrhaging or other serious complications within 45 days of taking mifepristone. Experts have found multiple flaws in the analysis, which was not peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal. For example, it counts ectopic pregnancies – wherein an embryo implants somewhere outside of the uterine lining – as a serious complication, but mifepristone neither causes nor worsens ectopic pregnancies.
- Nevertheless, anti-abortion groups have used that analysis as fodder to target abortion pills, which have become a major avenue of abortion access in the three years since the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
Read the entire article on The Guardian.
Published: Sep 4, 2025 | Last Modified: Sep 16, 2025