A new bill introduced by Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) would ban medication abortion across the country.
To support this plan, Hawley is relying on an ideologically motivated and highly deceptive report that purportedly shows abortion-inducing drugs are unsafe.
You are reading Sex & Tech, from Elizabeth Nolan Brown. Get more of Elizabeth’s sex, tech, bodily autonomy, law, and online culture coverage.
Hawley’s bill (S.4066) would withdraw U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the drug mifepristone for pregnancy termination and create a right of action for women to sue abortion pill manufacturers.
Republicans’ Abortion Pill Smear Campaign
Since 2000, the FDA has approved a two-pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol for abortion purposes.
This has become a renewed target of Republican regulation and ire since Roe v. Wade was overturned. In states where abortion is banned, women can still (fairly easily, it seems) have abortion-inducing medications shipped to them, making it difficult to entirely prevent women in these states from terminating their pregnancies.
Mifepristone has been the subject to both legal challenges and ridiculous smear campaigns in recent years. As the legal challenges have failed, the smear campaigns have picked up.
In one such effort, anti-abortion activists and politicians have started claiming that abortion pills are contaminating the water supply.
In another, they’r going after the safety of abortion drugs.
“Overall, most studies find that both medication and procedural abortions are safe for the women choosing to end their pregnancies,” Reason science correspondent Ron Bailey pointed out in 2024. Bailey noted a slew of studies on abortion safety (both surgical and drug-induced), including one finding abortion has lower rates of major complications than pregnancy, colonoscopy, or tonsillectomy.
“Toting up all of the cases reported to the FDA since 2000 finds that around 0.07 percent of the 5.9 million American women who have used medications to terminate their pregnancies have experienced any adverse events from taking them,” wrote Bailey.
“More than 100 scientific studies, spanning continents and decades, have examined the effectiveness and safety of mifepristone and misoprostol,” according to The New York Times. “A vast majority of the studies report that more than 99 percent of patients who took the pills had no serious complications.”
But a report released by the conservative Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) last year claims that abortion drugs have a serious adverse event rate of 10.93 percent. So what gives?
Much of the issue comes down to the way the report defines “adverse events.” The EPPC definition doesn’t line up with the FDA’s definitions. And in some cases, the EPPC report won’t even tell us what sort of complications it’s talking about.
The Dubious Data at the Center of Hawley’s Effort To Ban Abortion Pills
Hawley’s recent legislation relies on EPPC’s safety claims. “The science is clear: the chemical abortion drug is inherently dangerous to women and prone to abuse,” said Hawley last week. A press release from his office declared that “one recent study found that nearly 11% of women who use mifepristone experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, an emergency room visit, or another serious adverse event within 45 days.”
That report—and Hawley’s claims about it—are highly deceptive.
I wrote about this in depth last year when the report came out. The report’s authors analyzed insurance-claim information from patients they deemed likely to have taken mifepristone.
The report was not peer-reviewed and the authors did not make their data available for public scrutiny—so that’s one red flag. This becomes even more of a problem due to the report’s vague language and parameters.
Using insurance claims, the paper counts patients who may or may not have had an abortion, and adverse events that occur within 45 days of this possible abortion. That leaves a lot of uncertainty. And the vast majority of the adverse events that the report flags may represent minor complications or even benign situations.
The more well-defined and undeniably serious categories of adverse events—like sepsis or needing blood transfusions—occurred in very small percentages of patients that the report authors looked at. The rates for these serious adverse outcomes were in line with previous research.
Only 0.10 percent of claims suggest that patients had suffered from sepsis and 0.15 percent needed a blood transfusion. Some 0.22 percent suffered from what the study authors simply describe as “other life-threatening events.”
The biggest category of adverse events were what the authors call “other abortion-specific complications.” By definition, this is a category that excludes sepsis, infection, transfusion, hemorrhage, ectopic pregnancy, a need for a surgical abortion, and “other life-threatening events.” So what could be in this large category? The authors don’t really say.
The most concrete statement they offer about this mysterious category is that it includes some “mental health diagnoses” within a month and a half of having been prescribed mifepristone. They have no idea of knowing whether these diagnoses relate to the abortion itself, or the circumstances that led to the abortion, or something else entirely. Indeed, they have no idea how many patients even elected to end their pregnancies, as opposed to being prescribed these medications because of a spontaneous miscarriage.
And even when those diagnoses are related to the abortion, that’s not the kind of thing we’re talking about when we talk about medication safety. But it is the kind of thing the Ethics and Public Policy Center study misleadingly lumps in with “serious adverse events.”
The study’s second-largest category of adverse events was “emergency room visits.” But an ER visit alone doesn’t really tell us anything, and the FDA does not count emergency visits alone as adverse events.
Taking abortion pills necessarily involves bleeding, and some women may not be sure how much bleeding is normal. In addition, many women take these pills, or have these pills take effect, during hours when normal doctor’s offices are closed. So a woman with real or imagined complications from taking abortion pills may go to the emergency room in situations where a followup visit to a regular clinic or doctor would suffice, or in situations where bleeding is profuse but within a normal range.
Of the 865,727 likely mifepristone-enabled abortions the authors identified, some 40,000 (4.6 percent) involved emergency room visits but only 5,699 (0.66 percent) involved hospitalization.
A Dangerous Power Grab
Hawley isn’t just running wild with mifepristone misinformation. He’s trying to substitute the judgment of politicians for the judgment of scientists and health professionals.
Independent of any specifics surrounding mifepristone, we should be wary of members of Congress trying to override FDA approval of any device or drug.
The FDA is far from perfect. In many instances, it’s way too cautious and too slow to approve new protocols and treatments. But it has more expertise than senators with no training in science or medicine, many of them highly beholden to political interests. The FDA isn’t perfectly removed from politics, but it’s a lot further downstream than any members of Congress are.
If Hawley’s effort succeeds, we’re likely to see all sorts of medical approvals facing vetoes from Congress, turning the drug approval process into nothing but another front for culture war.
In the News
Colorado decrim measure suspended: The sponsor of a Colorado bill that would have decriminalized prostitution has killed the effort for now. From Colorado Springs’ KKTV:
Sen. Nick Hinrichsen, a Democrat from Pueblo, sponsored the legislation and then made a motion to postpone it in Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. The committee unanimously voted to lay the bill over to June 2, 2026, “essentially postponing it indefinitely,” according to a spokesperson for Colorado Senate Democrats.
The spokesperson also said Sen. Hinrichsen did not believe the measure had enough support to move forward, something Hinrichsen attributes [to] misinformation.
“Unfortunately, some of this bill’s biggest opponents knowingly and maliciously chose to misrepresent Senate Bill 97 as a legalization bill, seizing on and exacerbating public confusion. Rather than wrestle with the nuances of the very different decriminalization policy that Senate Bill 97 proposes, a red herring was offered instead,” Hinrichsen said.
The bill’s sponsors “have not said whether or not they plan to reintroduce the measure, or a similar version of it, in the future,” KKTV reports.
Read This Thread
Article in the Guardian warning about the dangers of AI psychosis. Apparently the “first major study” says chatbots can encourage delusions. Sounds bad!
On closer inspection this study turns out to be a “personal view” based on analysis of 20 media reports
There are no case… pic.twitter.com/ixPhCogD8X
— Rowland Manthorpe (@rowlsmanthorpe) March 15, 2026
More Sex & Tech
• FBI searches of Americans’ data are up, according to a letter sent to lawmakers by Ted Groves, acting assistant director of the FBI’s Office of Congressional Affairs. “The number of FBI searches of data collected through the surveillance program known as Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) between December 2024 to November 2025 rose to 7,413 from 5,518 the previous year,” notes The Record. Groves didn’t offer a reason for the increase. (Several senators just introduced legislation to reform the 702 program, but—alas—FISA reform measures have historically not fared well.)
• Proponents of the “Nordic model” of sex work regulation—in which paying for sex is criminalized but selling it is technically legal—have already tried to rebrand this as the “end demand model” and the “equality model.” Having failed to gain widespread support for either, they’re now trying to make it the “survivor model.”
• Roblox has introduced “real time rephrasing” of profanity in game chat, to “maintain civility.” While “parents may applaud real-time rephrasing as a way for the service to nudge younger users away from bad language in their interaction with others,” this “creates a dangerous proof of concept that others may build on, particularly in jurisdictions that want stricter controls on what people say online,” writes Glyn Moody at Techdirt.
• The Hollywood Reporter has uncovered a bizarre plot to accuse the producer of Rebel Wilson’s directorial debut, The Deb, of being a madame.
• A federal appeals court has taken an ax to parts of California’s burdensome and unconstitutional “Age Appropriate Design Code.”
