The Food and Drug Administration should “immediately” restore in-person dispensing requirements for the abortion pill, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told The Daily Signal.
The senator cited safety concerns in pressing the administration to act. “You don’t have to have a review to know that if a woman has an ectopic pregnancy, she’s gonna have a problem,” Cassidy said. “You don’t have to have a review to know that there’s documented cases of people coerced into taking this.”
Under President Joe Biden in April 2021, the administration stopped requiring that abortion drugs be dispensed to women in person.
President Donald Trump’s administration promised to conduct a safety review on the abortion pill, but more than seven months later, the agency is still in the “data acquisition phase,” Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary told The Daily Signal.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, of which Cassidy is the chair, is holding a hearing Wednesday on protecting women from abortion drugs. Cassidy hopes the hearing will “rehumanize” the issue by demonstrating how the pill harms both women and unborn children.
Cassidy urged Makary to finish the safety review, saying he is not happy with the speed of the process.
“Get it done quickly because it was promised during confirmation hearings that it would be done,” he said, “and there’s an expectation that it will be.”
“It seems like if they have a high priority to get something done—the data is already there,” Cassidy continued. “Sometimes you wonder where the data came from, and so why is it taking so long to set up the mechanism by which to acquire the data?”
Cassidy expressed frustration that while a safety review is underway, the Trump administration approved a second generic abortion drug in October. The FDA argued it had limited discretion under the law in deciding whether to approve a generic drug.
“The Biden administration did not feel compelled to approve it, but this administration did,” he said. “That just kind of struck me, well, wait a second, it just sat for four years into Biden and all of a sudden we’re gonna rush it through.”
Restoring the in-person dispensing requirement on mifepristone would protect women from being coerced to abort their children, Cassidy said.
At the hearing, Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill will testify about two cases where women were forced to take abortion pills that killed their unborn babies.
“The in-person visit allows the physician to speak to the patient to make sure that she understands the decision and she’s not being coerced,” Cassidy said. “We should care about that.”
In-person doctor visits also help a woman discover scenarios where taking the abortion drug would be unsafe or even life-threatening—if she has an ectopic pregnancy, or if she is further along in her pregnancy than she thinks.
“This is a really human story,” Cassidy said. “It’s not just taking a pill like a tylenol with no consequences. Of course we know there’s a consequence for the unborn child who is now aborted, but there’s a real potential consequence for the woman who’s carrying that child.”
“[We need to] humanize that, understand that there’s things we can do as a society that makes it more likely that she’s got autonomy, that she’s making decisions of her own free will, and that the health risk associated with taking the medicine for the mother are minimized,” Cassidy continued.
