Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) is once again spreading misinformation about the abortion pill mifepristone, and has taken his campaign a step further by introducing legislation to ban it.
The Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act, which Hawley introduced on Wednesday, would bar the use of mifepristone for abortions by withdrawing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 26-year approval of the medication. The bill would also allow women allegedly harmed by the drug to sue manufacturers of mifepristone.
“We are here today to issue a call to action,” Hawley said at a press conference announcing the bill. “To call on the United States Congress to stand up and to protect the innocent unborn, to protect the health and safety of women whose lives are endangered by the abortion drug known as mifepristone, and we’re also here to call on Congress to stand up to the greedy and foreign corporations who are making billions of dollars in profits by endangering women’s health.”
Hawley, who has continually attacked abortion pill access, claimed repeatedly that mifepristone is “inherently dangerous” and “completely unregulated.” He highlighted stories of women being coerced or forced by boyfriends into taking the abortion pill. Instead of going after the men who abused their partners, Hawley wants to ban medication used widely and safely by millions of people since the FDA first approved the drug in 2000.
The law is unlikely to pass since Hawley will need 60 votes in the Senate, and Republicans only have 53 seats. But influential Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) has already shown support for the bill, tweeting on Thursday that he was “all in” on the effort.
It makes sense that anti-abortion advocates have set their sights on the pill: Medication abortion (the combination of mifepristone and another drug, misoprostol) now accounts for at least 63% of all abortion care since the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. In 2024, 1 in 4 abortions in the U.S. were provided by telehealth.
“The Dobbs opinion is basically a dead letter so long as these abortion drugs can be mailed into every state,” Hawley said during the press conference.
Yet again, Hawley pointed to a junk science report published last year by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank and advisory board member of Project 2025. The report claims it’s the “largest-known study of the abortion pill” and that nearly 11% of women “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
But the report is not peer-reviewed, and data scientists have repeatedly voiced serious concerns about its validity. The EPPC report flies in the face of decades of high-quality research and hundreds of studies on mifepristone.
“The science is settled: mifepristone is safe and effective,” Blair Darney, vice president for domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute, said in a statement. “Decades of rigorous research from the U.S. and around the world has consistently demonstrated that serious adverse events occur in less than 1% of all medication abortions, a far cry from the one in ten statistic that anti-abortion policymakers have been citing in yet another baseless attempt to restrict access to this critical medication.”
This is just the most recent attack from Hawley. Last year, he introduced a law to ban the mailing of abortion pills and pushed the FDA to review the safety of mifepristone, citing the EPPC’s junk science report.
This comes during a time when abortion opponents are fracturing away from President Donald Trump. The administration is reportedly slow-walking the FDA’s review of mifepristone until after the 2026 midterm elections — enfuriating far-right anti-abortion advocates who have called for the head of the FDA to step down. Abortion opponents are also angry with Trump after the administration moved last week to dismiss a federal lawsuit against the abortion pill.
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