A federal court this past spring gave the Food and Drug Administration six months to prove it was making progress on a promised safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone, in Louisiana’s litigation challenging the Biden administration’s relaxed prescribing conditions, or the judge might reimpose politically popular restrictions including in-person dispensing.That deadline came Wednesday, a month before midterm elections projected to rip the House if not the Senate away from Republicans, and pro-life groups crucial to mitigating Democratic inroads are crying foul at the Justice Department’s status report to U.S. District Judge David Joseph, which finally describes the review’s sources and timeline after nearly a year of vagaries.
A final safety-review report won’t be completed until March 2027, and the status report makes no mention of reviewing commercial databases or “crucial Medicaid data” following the permanent elimination of the in-person dispensing requirement in 2023, opening the floodgates to pills by mail, as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser fumed.
The supposed “gold-standard study,” in the words of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is actually “fool’s gold,” Dannenfelser said, mocking FDA Commissioner nominee Heidi Overton’s pledge to Senate Republicans that the study will be done “in the most durable scientific way possible and the results communicated transparently.”
Live Action President Lila Rose, who made international waves in 2024 by publicly abandoning Trump’s re-election, blasted the FDA for the March 2027 completion deadline yet “no deadline for taking action” on mifepristone’s risk-mitigation evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS), through which it would change prescribing conditions.
“This delay is UNACCEPTABLE,” she wrote in an email blast. “The FDA must pull the abortion pill from the market NOW.”
The safety review’s details continue the sins of Democratic predecessors, in the view of pro-life groups: intentionally looking away from data that could reveal a higher rate of complications from mifepristone when followed by misoprostol, which evacuates the uterus.
The movement’s disillusionment with the president’s second term, after a first term that clinched the elimination of federal abortion rights via three Supreme Court appointments, is emblematic of a voter enthusiasm gap going into midterms – what the political analyst Charlie Cook recently termed a “red undertow” rather than a blue wave.
Only 30% of Trump’s 2024 voters are “very enthusiastic” about voting in midterms, in contrast to 48% of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s voters, according to a six-day Reuters-Ipsos poll that ended Monday. For ordinary enthusiasm, those figures are 21% for Trump voters and 18% for those of Harris.
Among Harris backers, 76% said they’re likely to vote, in contrast to 63% of Trump’s backers. The poll’s margin of error was 3 percentage points.
A financial behemoth in primary and general elections on behalf of preferred GOP candidates and nominees, SBA Pro-Life America has repeatedly warned the administration that GOP midterm turnout will crater unless it settles the Louisiana litigation by restoring in-person dispensing as the safety review continues.
