As injuries from the abortion pill force women into emergency rooms nationwide, congressional Democrats tried and failed to rebuke a federal investigation into the controversial drug’s mounting side effects. Critics say the House Democrats engaged in mass hypocrisy after spending most of the last year criticizing Republicans for questioning the safety of mifepristone after its FDA approval.
On Monday night, the House Appropriations Committee included a statement approving the Food and Drug Administration’s review of mifepristone, one of two drugs used to induce a chemical abortion in its markup of the Fiscal Year 2026 Agriculture Appropriations Bill. “The [c]ommittee supports the FDA conducting an internal review in light of new findings and data,” says the report. It also directs the FDA to brief the committee within 30 days of completing the new probe of mifepristone, noting “any subsequent regulatory actions or guidance considerations the agency may pursue.”
Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.) offered an amendment to strike the language, leading Republicans to note mifepristone’s deadly history — to mother and baby alike — and to question Democrats’ concern about women’s reproductive health.
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“Last night, Democrats on the Appropriations Committee tried to prohibit the FDA from reviewing the risks of the dangerous chemical abortion drug,” posted Rep. Riley Moore (R-W.Va.) on X Tuesday. “Their party supports abortion on demand, no questions asked, with no care for the women involved.” The amendment “prohibits the FDA from taking important steps to protect the health of women and the unborn,” said Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-Ala.).
Underwood’s amendment “would tell the FDA you cannot do post-marketing surveillance on a drug, because it happens to be mifepristone. That’s a very dangerous precedent,” said Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.). “Why would you not want to do that, unless you’re politically motivated to protect something? That’s dangerous.”
Harris dismissed Democrats’ concerns that many reports highlighting the harms of mifepristone have been produced by pro-life medical scholars, because “many of the [pro-mifepristone] studies are done by institutions that actually profit from abortion,” he said. “You don’t dismiss that. You look at the quality of the data.”
“The FDA should always be available to do post-marketing surveillance,” said Harris. “That’s exactly why you have an FDA.”
Critics say the Democrats are using the political process to halt an FDA drug safety review after they spent the last year criticizing pro-life advocates for allegedly disregarding the FDA’s approval in 2000 under the Clinton administration. “The FDA, not the courts, determines the safety of drugs,” declared Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), a member of The Squad and leader in the Abortion Rights and Access Task Force of the Pro-Choice Caucus, last April. Pressley induced the Biden-Harris administration’s FDA commissioner, Dr. Robert Califf, to tell the House, “It would be bad for the entire system of drug development and availability of medications in the United States if judges begin overruling the FDA as a matter of routine.”
Pro-abortion author Mary Ziegler, professor at the University of California-Davis, wrote, “The scientists at the F.D.A. might not even need to be on board” for pro-life advocates’ alleged “plan” to make chemical abortion inaccessible “for it to work. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a presidential appointee, can override the F.D.A.’s drug approval decisions,” she wrote disparagingly.
Under the Trump administration, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary have both promised to investigate the health impact and safety profile of mifepristone. “We need to understand the safety of every drug, mifepristone and every other drug,” said Kennedy during his January confirmation hearings. “As the Commissioner of Food and Drugs, I am committed to conducting a review of mifepristone and working with the professional career scientists at the Agency who review this data,” said Makary recently.
Democrats regularly cited Georgia’s pro-life laws in the chemical abortion death of Amber Nicole Thurman. But those conditions did not hold true in permissive Nevada, where 24-year-old Alyona Dixon had a chemical abortion at a Planned Parenthood business. Six days later, she went to a Las Vegas emergency room, bleeding with a high white blood cell count, and died of sepsis on September 28, 2022. She left behind a husband and their two-year-old son.
Yet survivors say they suffered mental and physical trauma from taking mifepristone. “I was bleeding so heavily, I believed I was dying. I was passing clots the size of baseballs, and I was in the worst physical pain of my life, worse than childbirth,” testified a woman using the name “Patricia” detailing her experience with chemical abortion. The pills resulted in an incomplete abortion requiring her to make numerous weekly visits to an OB-GYN and to suffer major blood loss.
But as excruciating as her symptoms were, she said the most enduring pain was emotional, not physical. The worst pain came when “I looked into the toilet and saw my baby. It had a head, body, and tiny arms and legs.”
“The shame and guilt … I felt … as I was forced to flush my aborted baby down the toilet, is impossible to describe,” she remembered.
Her experience proved anything but isolated. “I was on the shower floor SCREAMING, throwing up, bleeding everywhere, the pain was unbearable and unimaginable … and I have had brain surgery!!!” wrote another woman who had taken mifepristone, and who chose not to divulge her name. “NOBODY prepared me for the HUGE amount of blood and chunks, the intense excruciating pain, the nausea.” She described her chemical abortion via mifepristone as “the most traumatic thing I have ever experienced, and I still feel a sense of being numb.”
Rep. Andy Clyde (R-Ga.) noted the prevalence of “serious complications such as sepsis, infection, hemorrhage, or another serious adverse event.”
He also pointed out the lack of accountability when mifepristone pills cross state lines, often anonymously. He reported what occurred after a pregnancy resource center ordered mifepristone from a website. “About a week later, this murder drug arrived in the mail. There are no instructions, there are just three individual packages … and there is no identification on the packages saying what they actually are.” Clyde noted the return address on the pills came back to “‘Jane Smith, 2301 L Street Northwest, Washington, D.C.’ You know what that is? That’s the West End Public Library here in Washington, D.C.”
The Obama administration made it impossible to track the number of harms caused by the abortion pill process, as it ordered doctors to report only maternal deaths caused by mifepristone in 2016. But between 2000 and 2021, the FDA documented 4,207 adverse events from mifepristone use — including 26 deaths, 1,045 hospitalizations, 603 events requiring a blood transfusion, and 413 infections.
“The common thread between all of these tragic situations is chemical abortions,” said Moore. House Democrats “know this, but instead of acknowledging the dangers, they’ve chosen to use the deaths caused by chemical abortions as a political cudgel against states that protect unborn children like my state in West Virginia where, thank God, we have banned abortion.”
“As long as the prior administration’s policies are in place, the abortion industry will continue to put the lives of women at risk,” said Aderholt. “Unsafe mail-order abortions undermine pro-life laws across the country.”
Pro-life experts hailed House Republicans for their efforts to hold the abortion industry accountable.
“Democrats want to make sure the FDA does not review mifepristone. What are they afraid of?” asked Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at Family Research Council, in a conversation with The Washington Stand.
“Do they know that the FDA will find this drug leaves an astounding percentage of the women who use it with a complication serious enough to warrant an ER visit? Do they know that it’s making its way into our water system because of the number of unborn babies flushed down the toilet? Do they know that the further along a woman’s pregnancy is, the more likely the drug is to put her life at risk? What is it that Democrats are so afraid of the FDA revealing?”
“The American people deserve to know,” Szoch concluded. “Shame on House Democrats for trying to prevent an FDA review that could save countless lives.”
LifeNews Note: Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
