Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appears before the Senate Finance Committee for his confirmation hearing.
Last Friday, my colleague Julianne McShane and I broke the news of a pair of letters sent by 30 prominent anti-abortion movement leaders to the heads of the Departments of Health and Human Services and Justice, asking them to use the powers of their agencies to attack abortion pills.
During his contentious confirmation hearing as President Donald Trump’s nominee for HHS secretary today, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. signaled that he’d do exactly that. Under questioning from senators, Kennedy said that he would instruct the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration to study the safety of mifepristone—a medication that has been FDA-approved to end pregnancies for 25 years, with vast amounts of research supporting its safety and effectiveness.
“President Trump has made it clear to me that one of the things he is not taking a position [on] yet [is] mifepristone,” Kennedy said. “But he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues. And I’ll ask NIH, FDA to do that.”
The “safety concerns” that anti-abortion activists like to raise about mifepristone are a thin pretext for their ideological efforts to end all abortions, everywhere. It’s efficient for them to attack medication abortion because it accounts for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions, according to the most recent research. Last year, I reported on a lawsuit by anti-abortion doctors attacking mifepristone’s FDA approval:
From the beginning, the anti-abortion doctors’ arguments have been cloaked in such faux concerns about mifepristone’s safety. In their original complaint, the doctors argued that the FDA hadn’t had enough evidence to approve the drug or loosen regulations on it, and they cited flimsy research to suggest mifepristone was harmful. Those claims have been roundly debunked by mainstream medical associations, which explain that mifepristone is backed by decades of data. Even before it came to the United States, the drug was used for years for abortions in Europe; since its approval here in 2000, around 6 million people in the US have taken it. As the New York Times reports, more than 100 scientific studies have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.
Meanwhile. it turns out that some of the studies cited by the doctors weren’t scientific at all. One, relied on in Kacsmaryk’s decision, was based on anonymous blog posts from a site called “Abortion Changes You.” Last month, a journal retracted three other papers cited by ADF in the case, explaining that an independent review had found “fundamental problems,” “incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors,” and “misleading presentations.” Sage, the studies’ publisher, reported that nearly all their authors had affiliations with anti-abortion advocacy groups yet had not disclosed any conflicts of interest.
Of course, the real reason mifepristone is a target isn’t a result of science, but rather simple math: Medication abortions are immensely popular, accounting for nearly two-thirds of all abortions across the country. Thanks to recently enacted “shield laws” in a handful of states, including California and Massachusetts, providers there can now prescribe the pills to patients in states with abortion bans.
As McShane has noted, abortion rights could be undermined by Trump appointees throughout a number of government agencies. HHS, with its 80,000 people and responsibility to oversee the FDA, the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health, among other offices could potentially wield enormous power over reproductive health care. But, she explains, Kennedy’s position on the issue until now has been ambiguous:
Like Trump, Kennedy has been inconsistent on his abortion stances. In 2023, for example, he said he backed a 15-week national abortion ban before subsequently walking that back. His campaign told the Washington Post in November 2023 that he supported codifying Roe v. Wade and maintaining the FDA’s approval of mifepristone—but these were positions he held before Trump named him as his HHS nominee. Since then, abortion opponents have reportedly asked that Kennedy appoint a high-ranking anti-abortion stalwart to HHS and publicly commit during his confirmation hearings to restoring anti-abortion policies within HHS from Trump’s first administration, such as preventing abortion pills from being mailed or distributed at pharmacies and rescinding a Biden-era rule that stipulated HIPAA privacy protections should apply to abortions. (In December, anti-abortion Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) claimed in a post on X that during a private meeting with him, RFK Jr. had committed to those measures and others.) Project 2025 also makes a litany of anti-abortion recommendations for the HHS secretary, including issuing guidance that states can defund Planned Parenthood in their state Medicaid plans.
That ambiguity appears to have been resolved today.
