The 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned the right to an abortion is nothing more than a “dead letter,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said in a press conference on Wednesday.
His remarks stem from statistics showing that abortion numbers have continued to rise since the ruling, and despite 28 states restricting access to abortion, chemical abortions administered via telehealth in pill form have only expanded access. The Society of Family Planning’s #WeCount Study reported over half a million abortions — both in-person procedural and pill medication and telehealth mailed medication — from January to June of 2025.
In 2022, the national average for monthly abortions was 80,000. In the first half of 2025, it was 99,000, per the report.
Hawley accused the medication provided through telehealth abortions of being “inherently dangerous” and “inherently prone to abuse.” His recently proposed legislation would ban the drug entirely for abortion purposes and allow women who have experienced physical and psychological trauma after taking the pill to file lawsuits against their medication provider.
Providers of the medication, including Planned Parenthood, oppose the legislation.
“This is just the latest politically motivated attack from abortion opponents who will stop at nothing to take away your reproductive freedom and interfere in private medical decisions,” Shireen Ghorbani, president & CEO of Planned Parenthood Association of Utah, told the Deseret News.
It should be noted that Utah law prohibits local Planned Parenthood centers from prescribing abortion-inducing drugs through telehealth; patients must come into the center.
What is a chemical abortion?
Approved by the Federal Drug Administration in 2000, Mifeprex, better known as Mifepristone, taken in combination with misoprostol, became an abortion option for women up to 70 days from their last menstrual cycle.
Since it was introduced over 25 years ago, Hawley said it went from requiring “all sorts of warnings” to “one liberal administration after another, President (Barack) Obama and President (Joe) Biden remov(ing) almost all of the safety protocols around Mifepristone, such that today it is almost wholly unregulated.”
“They did this for one simple reason, and it had nothing to do with protecting women’s health,” he said. “Just the opposite. They did it because of abortion politics.”
Alongside him, standing in support of the bill, were multiple women who said they were failed by the FDA for allowing such lax regulation over a pill that did them so much damage. One mother, Elizabeth Gillette, recounted taking the pill after being “coerced” into it by her boyfriend at the time and the doctor who provided the drug.
“The next day, I took the second pill,” she said. “They told me it would be like a double period with some cramping — nothing that a Tylenol couldn’t cure, and I would be back to work within a day or two. That was also a lie. ... By myself, locked in a bathroom, I experienced tremors, I experienced sweats, I started to vomit, and when the bleeding started, it was so profuse there wasn’t enough towels or anything else to mop up the blood as it pooled on the floor around the toilet and in the tub."
During that experience, she said she passed a “perfectly formed amniotic sack, with my baby floating inside it, with recognizable eyes, limbs and ear buds,” and to this day she deals with emotional turmoil from it, “I will never unsee my dead child in my hand.”
Former Planned Parenthood director Mayra Rodriguez said she had repeated the phrases, “It will be like taking a Tylenol” and “You will bleed for two days,” even “when you see that big blood clot, just flush it down the toilet and don’t look,” so often to clients, she had them memorized.
“This has to stop,” she said. “Abortion should not be in our mailboxes.”
Rosalie Markezich said her boyfriend at the time ordered the pill from a website online, despite it being against the law in Louisiana, where they lived, and threatened her to take it despite her wishes to have the baby.
“My then-boyfriend would not have been able to order these drugs if the FDA hadn’t recklessly removed the requirement for an in-person office visit before prescribing them,” she said, “and if he had tried to force me to go to an abortion clinic to get these drugs, I would have told the doctor, ‘I do not want this.’”
“No woman should have to experience what I went through, and yet, I’m hearing story after story of women who are placed in unacceptable situations like mine because the FDA failed to protect them.”
Are their experiences rare?
In 2024, the FDA released a report on how often women are adversely affected by undergoing a chemical abortion since it was approved in 2000. Out of the approximately 7.5 million women who took the medication, 36 deaths were reported, and 97 ectopic pregnancies were estimated, but it was noted that they cannot be definitively attributed to the drug because other factors may be involved.
Ghorbani said that Hawley’s bill is “coming after medication abortion because it accounts for 63% of abortions nationwide. The fact is that an overwhelming body of medical research and evidence proves that mifepristone is safe and effective, much safer than having a child in this country, and millions of people have used it for miscarriage and abortion care.”
Regardless of whether or not the women who recounted their experiences put them in the minority or not, Hawley argued that drugs have been removed from FDA approval with a smaller percentage of adverse consequences.
He continued, “It’s not going to matter what voters anywhere do, unless we put power back into their hands. Unless we give women the right to have their day in court, and unless we withdraw the certification, the approval for abortion for this drug.”