FDA says its abortion pill review will finish in December, and it’s report will be due by March
The FDA told a federal court it expects to finish its safety review of abortion pills by mid-December and issue a report by March 2027, a timeline that lines up with reporting that the administration wants to delay abortion decisions past the midterms. The review, announced last spring by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after anti-abortion pressure on telemedicine prescribing, compares medication abortion's safety record to surgical abortion and reconsiders the 2023 telehealth rule.
Anti-abortion leaders are already rejecting the process in advance, with Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America calling it fool's gold rather than the gold-standard study they were promised, and Americans United for Life threatening to reject anything resembling a rubber stamp. They want the FDA to use broader insurance claims data, pointing to non-peer-reviewed white papers claiming a 22-times-higher adverse event rate using a looser definition than the FDA's own standard.
A law professor told Stateline she expects the review's outcome to be shaped by political calculation rather than science, since Republicans appear wary of the political cost of new restrictions. A researcher who has studied medication abortion's safety record separately cautioned that insurance claims data poorly captures telehealth abortion, since most telehealth providers do not take insurance.
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