During his confirmation hearing last Thursday, Trump nominee Dr. Marty Makary equivocated on whether Americans will maintain access to medication abortions if he’s confirmed as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Makary, a public policy researcher and surgeon at Johns Hopkins, told senators that his only plan for mifepristone (commonly called the abortion pill) is “to take a solid, hard look at the data” and “build an expert coalition” to assess potential risks associated with a drug that healthcare providers have been prescribing for the last 25 years.
As of 2022, 53% of all abortions in the United States were medication abortions. Scientists say medication abortion is safe—safer than penicillin, Tylenol, or Viagra—and, according to the FDA, 14 times safer than giving birth. Medication abortion is also highly effective: for pregnancies not advanced beyond 49 days, medication abortion has a 92-98% success rate.
Mifepristone, the drug several senators inquired about during Makary’s confirmation hearing, is effective for ending pregnancies up to 10 weeks. Mifepristone inhibits progesterone activity and interrupts pregnancy development; it’s often taken in concert with misoprostol, which causes contractions and expels pregnancy tissue. Medication abortions remain legal and available in many states, while campaigns like Plan C are working to secure access to abortion pills for all.
Makary’s “hedging” on mifepristone is the latest in a series of escalating threats to Americans’ abortion access, including Supreme Court Justices Alito and Thomas signaling their willingness to resurrect Comstock Laws to prevent mailing or even advertising abortifacients. Medication abortion provides a safe and private method to terminate pregnancy at a time when the National Abortion Federation reports that abortion patients and providers alike increasingly face stalking and death threats while seeking care. Relatedly, federal legislators reintroduced a resolution this Monday to mark March 10th as Abortion Provider Appreciation Day to honor the work of all abortion providers and commemorate the deaths of Drs. David Gunn, George Tiller, and others murdered for providing reproductive healthcare.
“With Trump and Republicans inciting violence and harassment at abortion clinics, the dedicated work of abortion providers is all the more essential in our fight to protect and advance reproductive justice. There is no just world in which abortion care providers should have to fear for their own lives and the lives of their patients,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley, co-chair of the Reproductive Freedom Caucus, on her website.
Regressive Christians continue to lead the opposition to Americans’ reproductive autonomy, from white Christian nationalist judges blocking mifepristone access to Catholic anti-abortion activists arguing that abortion and contraception endanger all American families. But religious groups and individuals are also mounting challenges to abortion bans as violations of religious freedom, as Jewish and Islamic theology both permit—and sometimes mandate—abortion. (In fact, Jewish Currents published a guide to giving yourself an abortion a few years back.) But of course arguments about the permissibility of abortion in other religious traditions—and about religious freedom more broadly—are unlikely to hold much weight with white Christian nationalists who believe American laws should reflect and enforce their theology.
