Pro-life orgs urge transparency, accuracy in FDA abortion drug review

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(The Center Center) – Two pro-life organizations submitted a Citizens’ Petition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, urging the agency to seek transparency, input from outside experts, and accurate and relevant data in its promised abortion drug review.

Dr. Christina Francis, CEO of one of the petitioning groups – the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists – told The Center Square that “the FDA must answer the medical community's call and give the American people the comprehensive safety review they deserve.”

Francis’ organization “and its members have spent the last 30 years both studying and contributing to the medical literature regarding mifepristone abortions,” she said. “As experts in this area, we have grave concerns about how the FDA (per its own report) appears to be conducting its long-promised safety review of the abortion drug.”

Francis said the FDA's safety review will be worthless if it relies on inadequate and incomplete data sets.

“We laid out in our citizens' petition exactly how the FDA can correct this and why it should,” Francis said.

The American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) along with the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI) urged the FDA in their Citizens’ Petition to include relevant and accurate data in the review, invite the input of outside sources for the review, and provide maximum transparency “regarding the design, conduct, and evaluation of the review.”

“Petitioners do not ask FDA to reach any particular conclusion regarding mifepristone's safety profile,” the petition said. “Rather, Petitioners ask FDA to ensure that its review relies upon the most complete datasets, the most rigorous methodologies, and the greatest possible transparency.”

A safety review of the abortion drug mifepristone was promised in 2025. 

In December 2025, pro-life organizations called out the FDA and its then-commissioner Marty Makary for having “slow-walked” its promised abortion drug review, as SBA Pro-Life America termed it.

The FDA has not yet responded to The Center Square’s request for comment.

Francis told The Center Square that “the FDA is tasked with ensuring that the medications it approves, and the conditions for their use, are safe for the American public.

“Physicians, like myself, are guided in how we counsel patients partly by FDA guidance,” Francis said. “American women and girls need to be able to trust that this guidance is based on thorough, accurate, and unbiased data collection and assessment.”

Francis told The Center Square that her clinical experience “as well as that of our thousands of members, confirms what the FDA should have known before it removed the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion drugs: that these extremely high-risk drugs should never be given without medical supervision.”

The number of in-person visits required to obtain the abortion pill were reduced under the Obama administration and done away with under Biden, The Center Square reported.

Francis said that “the FDA knew and admitted” doing away with in-person dispensing requirements “would cause more emergencies for women, and it did it anyway – and women and their preborn children are paying the price.”

The Center Square reported at the beginning of October that the FDA set a deadline of March 2027 for its mifepristone review to be complete by.