The father of the abortion pill has died, but questions over the safety of his creation live on.
Étienne-Émile Baulieu, the scientist who developed RU-486, which also known as mifepristone, died at home in Paris at 98 on May 30, 2025. The same month, a conservative, faith-based think tank in Washington, DC, released a study claiming the drug is more than 22 times more dangerous than previously reported.
Mifepristone, which is taken along with misoprostol, was used to terminate more than 600,000 pregnancies in the 12 months after the Supreme Court ruled that states could regulate or ban clinics that perform surgical abortions. Today, more than 60 percent of abortions in America are medication abortions.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the abortion pill in 2000 and says it is safe for women to use up to 10 weeks into pregnancy. As with any medicine, some people suffer side effects. But according to the FDA, fewer than 0.5 percent of women suffer serious adverse effects from mifepristone.
The Ethics and Public Policy Center, led by conservative Catholic commentator Ryan T. Anderson, announced it did a much larger study and came to a very different conclusion. The policy center’s study looked at insurance data from more than 865,000 women over a period of six years. Nearly 11 percent—around 94,000—experienced a harmful side effect, including infection, sepsis, and hemorrhaging.
Anderson said the study is the “equivalent of a category 5 hurricane hitting the prevailing narrative of the abortion industry” and “reveals, based on real-world data, the shocking number of women who suffer serious medical consequences because of the abortion pill.”
Experts in the field of women’s health disagree. Stella Dantas, former president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said the study “manipulates data to drive a myth” and it was not peer-reviewed and published in a scientific journal.
Jennifer Lincoln, an ob-gyn in Oregon, said there is lots of evidence the drug is safe.
“Thousands of people have used mifepristone in conjunction with misoprostol to have abortions that are without complication 99.7 percent of the time,” she said. “It is safer to take than Tylenol and far safer than a full-term pregnancy and birth.”
The Ethics and Public Policy Center stands behinds its study and is asking the FDA to review the data. The regulatory agency last looked at the safety of mifepristone in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term as president.
Pro-life advocates say that based on the policy center’s findings, the FDA should look again.
“If they’re serious about the practice of medicine and serious about the care of American people as patients, action is required based on this data,” said Brick Lantz, vice president of advocacy and bioethics at the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.
Lantz said the high rate of complications is truly alarming, and if those findings were happening in any other field of medicine with any other elective procedure, he’s confident physicians would lose their licenses for continuing to prescribe the drug.
Katie Glenn Daniel, director of legal affairs and policy counsel at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said there have been other studies that raise questions about the safety of mifepristone too and it’s time for authorities to take these concerns seriously.
She pointed to a peer-reviewed paper based on a study done by the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute. The paper examines the claim mifepristone is safer than Tylenol.
Charlotte Lozier Institute director of life sciences Cameron Louttit found the claim is baseless. He said “those spreading it lack the evidence they routinely claim.” He argues it has been repeated so often, though, that it has “profoundly influenced public opinion” and made people think the drug is safe.
Daniel shares that concern and said deregulation that allows the drug to be mailed to people only increases the risk.
“When there’s no doctor involved, there’s no adequate screening, it should come as no surprise that there would be more women going to the emergency room,” Daniel said.
She hopes the FDA reviews the effects of loosening the rules on the availability of the drug at the same time the agency looks at the Ethics and Public Policy Center data on its safety.
“What they’re gonna find is that putting these drugs in the mail—including sending them to kids—is extremely dangerous,” she said.
Christina Francis, a doctor in Indiana and the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said allowing people to purchase any drug without requiring them to consult with a doctor increases the likelihood of misuse and thus serious complication.
Women may take the drug when they’re further along in their pregnancies than the FDA says is safe, for example. Or, Francis said, they may not get screened first for the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy.
As a doctor in Indiana, she has personally seen an increase in complications from mifepristone as the drug has become more common.
She recalls one woman she treated who took mifepristone while 11 weeks pregnant. The woman showed up at the hospital where Francis works bleeding so severely that she needed a transfusion. She retained tissue that ultimately needed to be removed surgically, and additional complications impacted her kidney.
“Honestly, I wasn’t surprised to see the number of complications that they reported,” she said. “Women are not seeing a physician in person, many times not even interacting with a physician at all. They can go on these websites and just fill out a form and get these drugs shipped to them.”
Francis is pro-life and would like to see an end to all medication abortions. But the issue with the safety of mifepristone should matter to anyone who cares about women’s health, she said. Another review by the FDA would be good, she said, and she would like to see regulations around dispensation tightened again, at the very least.
“This is not how we provide medical care to women in this country—or shouldn’t be how we provide medical care to women in this country,” she said.
