Abortion

Josh Hawley Moves To Ban Abortion Pills

His push relies on dubious data about the pills' safety.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 3.16.2026 11:45 AM

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A new bill introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) would ban medication abortion across the country.

To support this plan, Hawley is relying on an ideologically motivated and highly deceptive report that purportedly shows abortion-inducing drugs are unsafe.

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Hawley's bill (S.4066) would withdraw U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone for pregnancy termination and create a right of action for women to sue abortion pill manufacturers.

Republicans' Abortion Pill Smear Campaign

Since 2000, the FDA has approved a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol for abortion purposes.

This has become a renewed target of Republican regulation and ire since Roe v. Wade was overturned. In states where abortion is banned, women can still (fairly easily, it seems) have abortion-inducing medications shipped to them, making it difficult to entirely prevent women in these states from terminating their pregnancies.

Mifepristone has been the subject to both legal challenges and ridiculous smear campaigns in recent years. As the legal challenges have failed, the smear campaigns have picked up.

In one such effort, anti-abortion activists and politicians have started claiming that abortion pills are contaminating the water supply.

In another, they'r going after the safety of abortion drugs.

"Overall, most studies find that both medication and procedural abortions are safe for the women choosing to end their pregnancies," Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey pointed out in 2024. Bailey noted a slew of studies on abortion safety (both surgical and drug-induced), including one finding abortion has lower rates of major complications than pregnancy, colonoscopy, or tonsillectomy.

"Toting up all of the cases reported to the FDA since 2000 finds that around 0.07 percent of the 5.9 million American women who have used medications to terminate their pregnancies have experienced any adverse events from taking them," wrote Bailey.

"More than 100 scientific studies, spanning continents and decades, have examined the effectiveness and safety of mifepristone and misoprostol," according to The New York Times. "A vast majority of the studies report that more than 99 percent of patients who took the pills had no serious complications."

But a report released by the........

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