Headline Roundup • May 15th, 2025
RFK Directs FDA to Review Abortion Pill Mifepristone Amidst Debate Over Its Safety
Summary from the AllSides News Team
Following a new study from a conservative think tank alleging that the abortion pill mifepristone is more dangerous to women than the label says, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he's directed the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to conduct a full review of the drug.
The Details: FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said there are no plans to change access to the drug at this time, and the Trump administration is seeking to dismiss a lawsuit against mifepristone that would restrict access to it. Outlets on the left were more likely to cover the Trump administration's defense of the pill, while outlets on the right were more likely to pick up Kennedy's comments about FDA review of the pill.
The Data: The study from the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) claimed that serious adverse effects from mifepristone are 22 times more likely than its label warns. Currently, the label says “less than 0.5%” of women experience “serious adverse events,” while the study found 11%.
The Debate: HuffPost (Left bias) described the study as "junk science" and outlets on the left framed it as being used to restrict access to abortion. Voices from the left pointed out the study was not peer-reviewed, did not reveal its database, and offered vague descriptions. About half of the complications were labeled abortion-specific complications, described as “[diagnostic] codes specifically related to an abortion or miscarriage, as well as life-threatening mental health diagnoses, etc.” However, voices on the right argued that critics are nitpicking the study to downplay its findings. A piece in the The Federalist (Right) read, “Researchers excluded 72 percent (or 98,483) of the emergency room visits because they were either unrelated to the abortion pill or failed to meet the medically serious threshold outlined by the National Institutes of Health,” and added, “Chemical abortion is known to harm women in countless ways that are not always neatly sorted into insurance diagnostic codes.”
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Featured Coverage of this Story
ABC 7 Chicago/YouTube
The Washington Post’s resident “fact-checker” Glenn Kessler ran circles around himself this week when he tried to undermine the most comprehensive U.S. study on the drug regimen responsible for more than half of the nation’s abortions.
Kessler appears to have searched high and low for a crumb of evidence he could use to discredit a recently released Ethics and Public Policy Center study showing 10.9 percent of women who take mifepristone will suffer serious, sometimes life-threatening side effects. Instead, he ended up affirming that the data benchmarks that give the study legitimacy...
The Ethics and Public Policy Center, a think tank that says it opposes “the extreme progressive agenda while building consensus of conservatives,” recently issued a report on a key abortion medication, mifepristone, that it says raises questions about its safety. After analyzing insurance claims for more than 865,000 prescribed mifepristone abortions, the group said it had determined that almost 11 percent of women experienced a “serious adverse event,” much higher than an overall 0.5 percent rate found in clinical studies.
That headline number led Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri) to declare that the...
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