The Real Meaning of RFK Jr.’s Cryptic New Remarks on Abortion
EPPC is aiming high, hoping the Trump FDA will take mifepristone off the market altogether.
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The Trump administration’s next steps on reproductive rights have remained a question mark for months, but cryptic remarks by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before Congress last week might have revealed the start of a plan. Investigation has emerged as the administration’s strategy on abortion. That was what RFK promised, explaining that he had recently launched an inquiry as to the safety of one of the most closely studied drugs in the world, mifepristone. Investigation has lots of advantages: It gives Trump an excuse to postpone dealing with reproductive rights until he is ready—even potentially after the 2026 midterm. But more than that, it gives him political cover. Trump has promised to leave abortion to the states, but armed with new data and a fresh inquiry, he can now claim the mandate to change his mind.
Since January, when Trump took office, anti-abortion leaders have devised various strategies to get the administration to act on access to abortion pills. Anti-abortion lawmakers have sent letters to the president; conservative attorneys general have courted Attorney General Pam Bondi and pressed on with a lawsuit challenging the current rules governing the drug. Most recently, Sen. Josh Hawley has proposed a bill on mifepristone that would direct the Food and Drug Administration to impose new restrictions on the drug, allow people to file lawsuits against prescribers and pharmacies, and prohibit foreign companies from the mailing the drug.
All of this is meant to force Trump to act. But if the president isn’t moved by the federal courts or the stock market, Josh Hawley is not likely to do any better. That seemed to be part of RFK’s message to Hawley: Any change on mifepristone, he suggested, would come through the White House. Hawley might be planning to gently nudge Trump toward a national ban, but RFK’s implications were clear. It’s Trump who’s calling the shots.
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Trump, for his part, may simply want to buy time. The president knows that the issue hurts him and his party politically, but he’s equally aware that many of his most ardent donors and supporters expect big things from him when it comes to limiting reproductive rights. Kicking the can down the road is the logical choice, especially with Republicans looking at a dogfight over control of the House in 2026. Moving quickly might make it easier for Democrats to retake that chamber and throw up roadblocks in front of Trump’s real priorities.
But investigations don’t just seem to be about pushing people like Hawley to one side. RFK referenced a recent study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a socially conservative think tank, that released what it claimed was the largest-ever study of mifepristone. Authored by the president of EPPC, Ryan Anderson, and its director of data analysis, the report claimed that the adverse incident rate tied to mifepristone was 22 times higher than the FDA recognized.
Critics pointed out numerous problems with the paper’s methodology and conclusions. It wasn’t peer-reviewed or published; it highlighted some risks already detailed on the drug’s warning label, for example, and counted as adverse events things that might signal real medical trouble, like a visit to the emergency room, or that had nothing to do with taking the drug, like an ectopic pregnancy. The quality of the EPPC report wasn’t the point, as far as abortion opponents were concerned. They had heard Trump promise over and over to let the states set their own policies on abortion. That meant leaving the status quo on mifepristone alone. The EPPC report is an attempt to give the president an out. Trump can claim that he believed in good faith that he would leave the rules governing mifepristone alone, but then the data changed. The EPPC report doesn’t need to be scientifically convincing if it is politically convenient. And the strategy may pay dividends. RFK seemed at least somewhat receptive, suggesting that at a minimum, the drug’s warning label should be changed.
The EPPC and its allies are hoping that at a minimum, the FDA will reinstate restrictions requiring that mifepristone be dispensed in person. That would make mifepristone much harder to get for patients in every state, including those that treat abortion as a right—especially for patients in rural areas.
As important is that this kind of restriction could make state abortion bans much easier to enforce. A number of states have passed shield laws, which aim to protect their residents from civil and criminal consequences for helping out-of-state abortion-seekers. One of the most consequential developments under these laws is the emergence of shield doctors, who mail medication into ban states.
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It’s too early to know what will come of RFK’s investigation. After all, he reminded us that whatever happens next, the buck will stop with Trump. What we know already is that the investigation isn’t really about the safety of mifepristone. It’s about whether Trump can find a way to break his campaign promises without crippling political fallout, or whether the anti-abortion movement can simply convince him not to care about those political consequences anymore.
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