The rate of women suffering adverse health complications after taking abortion pills was “significantly higher” after the Biden FDA made the drug available through mail-order and rescinded the in-person dispensing requirement, a new report claims.
On Tuesday, the Ethics & Public Policy Center released a report that examined the adverse event data for the abortion drug mifepristone before and after the FDA removed the requirement for in-person doctor visits.
The database for the report — which was written by EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson and Director of Data Analysis Jamie Bryan Hall — covers prescriptions of mifepristone for abortion from Jan. 1, 2017, through Dec. 31, 2023.
For the study, the researchers compared the rate of serious adverse events from Jan. 1, 2017, through July 13, 2020 (Period 1), with the rate of serious adverse events from July 13, through Dec. 31, 2023 (Period 2), which included three months in which the in-person requirement was in effect.
According to the analysis, the rate of serious adverse events rose from 10.15% when the in-person requirement was enforced to 11.50% after the FDA removed the requirement, a statistically significant difference of 1.35 percentage points and a 13% increase.
“Without requiring an in-person doctor visit, anyone can go online and get mail-order abortion pills. There is no way to ensure that the unborn baby hasn’t grown so large that chemical abortion is unsafe for the mother, no way to ensure that the unborn baby isn’t implanted outside of the uterus where using chemical abortion drugs could prove deadly to the mother, and no way to ensure that it’s the mother who is voluntarily requesting the chemical abortion drugs and not a boyfriend seeking the pills to secretly and coercively poison her,” Anderson said in a Tuesday statement.
The study that Anderson authored also found that prescriptions for mifepristone given to women experiencing an ectopic pregnancy — a life-threatening condition that occurs when a fertilized egg develops outside the uterus — increased from 0.27% before the policy change to 0.41% afterward.
“The estimated strength of the relationship between remote dispensing of mifepristone and the higher rate of serious adverse events depends on the percentage of mifepristone prescriptions in Period 2 that were dispensed remotely. We do not have firm data on that percentage,” Anderson and Hall noted in the report.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization formerly affiliated with Planned Parenthood, chemical abortion accounted for 63% of all abortions in 2023. The study authors also cited several reports that noted an increase in the number of virtual abortion clinics and the remote dispensing share of abortions.
Anderson and Hall also modeled several scenarios due to a lack of documentation on the number of abortion pills dispensed remotely.
“If remote dispensing of mifepristone accounted for 10% of all prescriptions in Period 2 (which is a reasonable but rough estimate for the entire period, given the information presented above on the increase in remote dispensing from 0% to 30% market share over 3 years), this would imply a rate of serious adverse events of 23.65% for remote dispensing — 13.50 percentage points higher than for in-person dispensing,” the researchers wrote.
In a second scenario, in which remote dispensing of mifepristone accounted for 25% of all prescriptions in Period 2, the projected serious adverse event rate would be 15.55%, which is 5.40 percentage points higher than in-person dispensing.
The new findings follow another study released by the EPPC in April 2025 that found 10.93% of women “experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.”
According to the study, the rate of adverse events experienced by women who take the abortion pill is at least 22 times higher than the “less than 0.5%” figure cited based on clinical trials.
Pro-life advocates have repeatedly called on President Donald Trump’s administration to crack down on the shipment of abortion drugs across state lines. Advocates have also expressed frustration over the FDA’s promised safety review of the abortion drug mifepristone, with some fearing that the review is being delayed.
These concerns were amplified after a report emerged that FDA Commissioner Marty Makary had told agency officials to delay the mifepristone review until after the midterm elections.
In response to claims that the administration is slow-walking the review, White House officials have insisted that thorough reviews take time.
“The White House maintains the utmost confidence in Commissioner Makary, whose leadership at the FDA has delivered and continues to deliver one landmark victory for the American people after another, from cracking down on artificial ingredients in our food supply to conducting the first safety review of baby formula in decades,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told The Christian Post at the time.
“Uninformed attacks against Commissioner Makary from individuals outside the Administration will not change these facts,” he added.
Samantha Kamman is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter: @Samantha_Kamman
