The Trump administration said it expects to complete a study of the abortion pill in December and draft a report on the results by March, as it tries to decide how the drug should be made available.
The Department of Justice told a federal judge that it is still working on the study “to assess the safety of mifepristone,” the key drug in the abortion pill regimen.
Opponents of the pill have challenged both its prescription and Biden administration changes that made it available through telehealth visits. Federal courts are deciding on those claims.
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Trump officials have urged the courts to hold off and wait for the completion of the Food and Drug Administration review.
In its filing Wednesday before one of the courts, the Justice Department defended the timeframe for the FDA review, saying it takes time to gather data and to conduct a feasibility review, which validates the data.
The comparison is between outcomes for pharmaceutical abortions and surgical abortions through 70 days gestation.
“FDA will conduct detailed safety analyses, which will consist of measuring the frequency of a variety of safety outcomes and comparing the frequency of those outcomes between women who use mifepristone and the comparator group, adjusting for baseline differences in both groups of women,” the Justice Department said.
Abortion opponents say the pill regimen has become a way for women to circumvent states with strict abortion limits by having it mailed to them.
They also point to shocking but rare public reports of women being forced to take the drug to end a pregnancy they didn’t want to terminate.
The pill’s supporters say it’s a safe and convenient way to terminate a pregnancy.
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