Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics about Abortion

How Well-Financed Anti-Abortion Groups Are Working with Team Trump to Limit Abortion Access

Some people expressed surprise when the Trump administration moved to dismiss the federal case against the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of abortion medicine Mifepristone a few weeks ago, but don’t be fooled. To borrow a phrase from Sherlock Holmes… another game is afoot.

The Trump administration’s new game is to use the FDA – rather than rely on Matthew Kacsmaryk, an anti-abortion activist Trump named as a judge to the district court in Texas – to bar access to that specific abortion pill medication. Especially with the Trump administration now trying to bar federal district court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions against its draconian immigration policies and more, the MAGA crew needed a different strategy to secure their goal here: blocking medication abortion everywhere.

Mifepristone has become the main method for abortion in the U.S. since Trump’s Supreme Court justices – who were hand-picked by anti-abortion, dark money man Leonard Leo – joined with other Republicans to overturn Roe v. Wade and federal constitutional protection for abortion. That reversal of long-standing legal precedents was accomplished through the 2022 Dobbs case. Trump took credit for Dobbs when the ruling was issued, but on the campaign trail last year, he tried to distance himself from that controversial ruling, which has caused numerous women to die over the past nearly three years in states that severely limited access to abortion.

Now, let’s fast forward to this past spring when Trump’s nominee to lead the FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, told the Senate that he had “no preconceived plans” to change the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a drug that numerous scientific studies have found to be safe. In fact, it’s actually safer than Tylenol or Viagra.

Markary, fittingly, became the commissioner of the FDA on April Fool’s Day. A few weeks later, on April 24, he told PBS he had “no plans” to take action on Mifepristone, but added “we can't promise we're not going to act on that data that we have not yet seen.” Then, presto, four days later, a group called the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) announced a new “study” claiming that Mifepristone “is not safe and effective.” EPPC is a right-wing anti-abortion group funded in part through the billion-dollar trust fund helmed by none other than Dobbs architect Leonard Leo. Leo is on EPPC’s governing board, too.

The problem is, as the Washington Post’s fact-checker found, EPPC’s “study” is deeply flawed because it was not subject to peer review, its data is not available for validation, and it used questionable terminology to juice its claims about safety. But the bigger problem is that these obvious and deep flaws did not stop Trump’s health secretary, the unhinged Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., from announcing, in response, that he had ordered the FDA to re-review Mifepristone, which is a step toward potentially banning this safe and effective medicine.

It sure looks like a bunch of pre-planned chess moves by the well-funded anti-abortion gang.

However, the fight is far from over.

Regressive anti-abortion operatives have not yet won. It was just last month that progressives and moderates struck a resounding blow against them and Elon Musk when the MAGA crew tried to capture the swing vote on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, with access to abortion and other issues at stake. The new games that Leo-funded groups are playing with women’s health are dangerous, but they also present new opportunities to help get out the vote in the coming elections in Pennsylvania and Virginia this fall, as a prelude to the midterm elections next year.

Together, we have a lot of work to do to protect access to safe abortion medicine and to expand the majority of Americans who reject repression and want to work together to help America live up to its promise to be the land of the free.

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What I’m reading:

• Abortion, Every Day by Jessica Valenti

  • She pulls no punches in defense of our equality and our right to control our bodies and our destiny.

• Ms. magazine’s coverage of efforts by House Republicans to cut Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood for pap smears and contraceptives for Americans living in poverty

  • For decades, Medicaid has barred use of federal funds for abortion, but this is a new MAGA effort to use the federal budget to bar funding for other health services, cuts that would harm the health and wellbeing of millions of Americans.

• Tilted Scales, the newsletter of Court Accountability, which is a group I help lead

  • The newest edition provides more details on these and other attacks on access to abortion.

• And, of course, the U.S. Constitution

  • Which does indeed specify that anyone born in the U.S. is an American citizen (and does not extend civil rights to the moment of conception).

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