The US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has suggested that Biden-era regulations expanding access to abortion pills could be rolled back because the Biden administration had “twisted the data” behind the pills.
Kennedy made the remark more than an hour into a tense interrogation by members of the US Senate judiciary committee over his chaotic tenure at the health department, which has been marked by thousands of layoffs and the promotion of leaders with little background in public health and medicine.
Kennedy did not back up the accusation, which runs counter to more than three decades of research. More than 100 studies, conducted across dozens of countries, have found that mifepristone and misoprostol, the abortion pills typically used in the United States, are a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.
The comment came when James Lankford, a Republican senator from Oklahoma, asked Kennedy whether the Trump administration intended to reverse the Biden-era changes to access to mifepristone. In 2016 and 2021, the FDA rewrote its regulations of the drug to allow healthcare providers other than doctors to prescribe it and to make it easier for patients to receive mifepristone through telemedicine.
“You’d said there would be a review on that, just to be able to look at it, make sure we’re following all safety protocols,” Lankford said. “Do you know a timing on that review?”
“I can’t give you an exact timing,” Kennedy said, adding that he had talked to FDA commissioner Marty Makary about the issue.
“We’re getting data in all the time. New data that we’re reviewing. And we know that during the Biden administration, they actually twisted the data to bury one of the safety signals, a very high safety signal, around 11%,” Kennedy said. “We’re gonna make sure that doesn’t happen any more.”
Kennedy appeared to be referring to an analysis published in an April paper by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing thinktank, that claimed almost 11% of women experience sepsis, hemorrhaging or other serious complications within 45 days of taking mifepristone. Experts have found multiple flaws in the analysis, which was not peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal. For example, it counts ectopic pregnancies – wherein an embryo implants somewhere outside of the uterine lining – as a serious complication, but mifepristone neither causes nor worsens ectopic pregnancies.
Nevertheless, anti-abortion groups have used that analysis as fodder to target abortion pills, which have become a major avenue of abortion access in the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
Other parts of Kennedy’s testimony were also marred by inaccuracies. Later in the hearing, Kennedy claimed: “For the first time in 20 years today, we learned that infant mortality has increased in our country. It’s not because I came in here. It’s because of what happened in the Biden administration – that we will end.”
Infant mortality in the US spiked for the first time in 2022, not 2025, according to the Commonwealth Fund. At least part of that spike is likely due to the emergence of abortion bans, particularly in Texas, which outlawed virtually all abortions in 2021.
Numerous studies have linked abortion bans – which are now in effect in more than a dozen states and have been championed by Republicans – to rising infant deaths, as they can require women carrying nonviable pregnancy to give birth to infants who do not survive.
