When the FDA approved mifepristone twenty-five years ago, it did so with full awareness that the drug carried serious risks—risks significant enough to warrant a special safety program known as a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS). Yet reading recent headlines, one might think the abortion pill had achieved something close to sainthood.
In late September, STAT News marked the anniversary by calling mifepristone a “hero” of modern abortion care—safer, they claimed, than Viagra or even pregnancy itself. Within days, The Guardian, NPR, PBS NewsHour, and Scientific American joined the chorus, publishing nearly interchangeable pieces that hailed the drug’s “exceptional safety” and dismissed any dissent as “junk science” or “conservative backlash.”
Not one of these outlets seriously engaged with the growing evidence—or the real experiences of women—that challenge this carefully curated narrative. Rather than functioning as skeptics, which is what reporters are supposed to do, too many journalists have become defenders of the abortion industry’s narrative.
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The Myth of Risk-Free Abortion Pills
If these stories are to be believed, mifepristone is virtually without risk. But what these glowing portrayals leave out is more telling than what they include.
The FDA still lists hemorrhage, infection, and undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy as serious complications. Women can and do end up in emergency rooms with heavy bleeding or incomplete abortions.
Yet none of the recent articles named above makes mention of a fundamental change made by the Obama administration in 2016. It was then that FDA weakened the reporting requirements for mifepristone, instructing prescribers to report only deaths—not injuries, infections, or hospitalizations. That single policy change made it nearly impossible to know the true number of women harmed.
Relying on the absence of reported complications as proof of safety isn’t just misleading—it’s like saying a crime never happened because no one filed a police report.
When the Press Acts as the PR Arm of the Abortion Industry
Let’s take three examples of these scrutiny-free stories.
- Scientific American criticized the FDA’s current review of mifepristone as “politically motivated,” ignoring the legitimate concerns about mail-order distribution and a lack of patient oversight.
- The Guardian dismissed pro-life medical research as “non-peer-reviewed” while quoting sources and studies authored or funded by abortion advocates.
- NPR and PBS NewsHour, both publicly funded, described the FDA’s approval of a generic version as a “routine win for affordable access” but said nothing about the fact that expanding the market also multiplies the risks for women left without proper care.
These outlets failed to ask even the most basic journalistic questions.
Who profits from these pills? How are complications tracked when women are told to conceal their abortions? What happens when complications arise far from a clinic—or when emergency doctors don’t know what drug a woman has taken? And perhaps most importantly, what ethical line is crossed when a drug that ends one human life and endangers another is described as “care”?
Safety Without Oversight Is a Dangerous Illusion
Every American—regardless of where they stand on abortion—should be concerned when major media outlets treat pharmaceutical marketing as unquestionable truth. Mifepristone’s promoters often claim it is “safer than pregnancy,” but that comparison distorts reality. Pregnancy is not a disease. It is a natural, biological process.
Abortion, by contrast, deliberately disrupts that process through powerful drugs designed to end a life and expel the developing child from the womb. Calling that “safer” isn’t science—it’s spin.
This kind of journalism erodes public trust. When reporters trade skepticism for advocacy, the result is propaganda disguised as health reporting.
Women Deserve Truth, Not Talking Points
Mifepristone is not a “hero.” It is a drug that carries real risks and has benefited from years of political protection and weak oversight. The women who suffer complications aren’t statistics—they are real people: daughters, sisters, friends, and mothers whose experiences rarely make headlines because they don’t fit the preferred narrative.
Instead of uncritically repeating talking points from abortion advocates, reporters should be asking why the FDA no longer collects complete safety data, how telehealth abortions are being monitored, and what happens when something goes wrong.
Until those questions are asked and answered honestly, these glowing features about mifepristone’s “safety” are not journalism. They are public relations for an industry that profits from death and risk and calls it empowerment.
Women deserve far better than that.
LifeNews.com Note: Laura Echevarria is the Director of Media Relations and a spokesperson for the National Right to Life Committee.
