This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) filed a court-ordered status report telling a Louisiana federal judge that it will not complete its ongoing safety review of the dangerous abortion pill mifepristone until March 2027.

The status report is the FDA’s first substantive update on the safety review since it commenced the study in September 2025 after 22 state attorneys general raised safety concerns about the drug and the agency’s relaxed dispensing requirements allowing mail-order access to abortion pills. Many pro-life organizations have expressed frustration at how long the study is taking as mail-order abortion drugs accounted for more than 300,000 of the nearly 1.13 million U.S abortions in 2025—approximately 90,000 of them occurring in pro-life states where abortion bans are being circumvented by the mail-order policy.  

The filing states that the FDA “is on track to obtain study results by mid-December 2026” and to complete a report on the final study results “no later than March 2027.”

The status report elaborated that the safety review involves comparing the safety profile of mifepristone with that of surgical abortions, as well as using a variety of data sources and statistical data mining to study the drug’s safety. The review will study the safety outcomes for 200,000 women, who are divided equally into a mifepristone group and comparator group, to identify previously unknown safety concerns, the report noted.

“Following completion of its study and review, FDA will decide whether changes to the Mifepristone REMS Program are necessary,” reads the status report.

In April 2026, U.S. District Judge David C. Joseph had ordered the FDA to provide the status by October 7 as part of Louisiana’s lawsuit against the FDA. The state argues that the FDA’s rule changes which eliminated in-person doctor visits and allows the abortion pill to be sent by mail were made without adequate scientific justification. Louisiana claims the FDA’s actions undermine pro-life state abortion bans with illegal abortions and impose financial burdens on the state, particularly through Medicaid costs associated with emergency care following chemical abortions.

Judge Joseph paused the case pending the FDA’s promised “good faith, evidence-based and expeditious review” of mifepristone’s safety risks. The ruling temporarily denies Louisiana's effort to roll back the FDA's 2023 decision to deregulate the drug. Even though the case remains on hold until the safety review is complete, Judge Joseph stated that the plaintiffs “are likely to succeed on the merits” due to the FDA’s “own shortcomings” in loosening the drug’s safety restrictions. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May 2026 that abortion pills would stay accessible while the case is pending in the lower court.

Also this week, the medical journal Issues of Law and Medicine published a critical analysis from the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) on the FDA’s relaxation of abortion drug rules. The analysis shows that the FDA’s decision-making was based on flawed, incomplete data that failed to account for real-world scenarios and conditions, and was suspect to vast underreporting of complications due to reporting regulations that had also been relaxed. The study notes that abortion pill complications consisted of “higher rates of severe pain, heavy bleeding or hemorrhage, ongoing pregnancy/failed abortion, incomplete abortion/retained tissue, ectopic pregnancy, and the necessity of additional procedures compared to surgical abortion.”

CLI researchers concluded that the “FDA failed to demonstrate the safety or removing” the in-person dispensing requirement and recommended the rule be reinstated.

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “The FDA’s deregulatory actions regarding abortion drugs allow innocent children to be destroyed and women to be harmed. While the Trump administration has promised ‘gold-standard science’ in this safety review, abortion providers are violating federal law and circumventing state abortion laws by facilitating abortion pill trafficking nationwide through the mail. The FDA needs to reinstate safety measures for abortion pills now!”