Operation Rolling Thunder was a sustained U.S. bombing campaign over Vietnam. The Rolling Thunder Revue was a 1975–76 madcap concert tour headed by Bob Dylan, featuring extraordinary musicians and collaborators. Now, there’s a new “Rolling Thunder”; a maximalist anti-abortion campaign aimed at pressuring the Trump administration, the FDA, Congress and the courts to ban the use of mifepristone. To bolster their claims against mifepristone, abolitionists have latched on to a new non-peer-reviewed highly questionable study by a conservative think tank.
During the Presidential campaign, Trump juked and jived on his position on abortion access as seven states passed measures to enshrine abortion rights and several others, including red Kansas blocked efforts to restrict existing access. Now the Administration must balance the real-politique of the upcoming mid-term elections with the zeal of the anti-abortion coalition.
The question remains as to whether abortion abolitionists can prevail over the will of the majority of women and men who support access to abortion.
Restricting and ultimately banning access to medication abortion has been a longtime goal of the conservative movement. According to the Guttmacher Institute, The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, the playbook for the Trump administration, advocated “reinstating medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone that require in-person dispensing and limit who can prescribe and receive the medication.
“By effectively ending telehealth provision of the method, these restrictions would limit access to the method for anyone who faces barriers to reaching a brick-and-mortar clinic, including individuals receiving telehealth care (under the protection of shield laws) in states where abortion is banned.”
Project 2025 “also recommends revoking mifepristone’s US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval, which would remove the drug from the market entirely.”
Politico’s Alice Miranda Ollstein recently reported that, “While the Trump administration paid little attention to the medication in its first months in office, and even filed a court brief to preserve access, the activists are counting on a report from the conservative think tank Ethics and Public Policy Center to light a fire under those in power.”
Ollstein further notes that “Mifepristone, one of two drugs used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., is a longtime target of conservative activists who consider it the primary driver of the increase in abortions since Roe’s fall in 2022 and the method millions of women are using to circumvent state bans”
According to the Ethics and Public Policy Center report:
- This largest-known study of the abortion pill is based on analysis of data from an all-payer insurance claims database that includes 865,727 prescribed mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023.
- 10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.
- The real-world rate of serious adverse events following mifepristone abortions is at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of “less than 0.5 percent” in clinical trials reported on the drug label.
- The FDA should immediately reinstate its earlier, stronger patient safety protocols to ensure physician responsibility for women who take mifepristone under their care, as well as mandate full reporting of its side effects.
- The FDA should further investigate the harm mifepristone causes to women and, based on objective safety criteria, reconsider its approval altogether.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA chief Marty Makary — have already expressed openness to re-examining the pills’ safety and efficacy. The Guardian reported that “Last month, Makary told the Semafor World Economy Summit that he had ‘no plans to take action’ on mifepristone. However, he added: ‘There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone. So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.’”
While Ollstein pointed out that “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective,”
Anti-abortion activists are treating the Ethics and Public Policy Center report as if receiving manna from heaven. “One of the things that we have the ability to do now with this data is to pressure the FDA and lawmakers to reconsider, if not suspend, their approval of this medication until they can do more research into it,” Maria Baer, a podcast host for the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, said on a private Zoom call last week where anti-abortion leaders discussed the strategy. The groups on the call included Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Americans United for Life, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Students for Life and Live Action.
Abortion-rights supporters are calling the report “junk science,” maintaining, according to Ollstein, “that the paper was released directly by the conservative think tank and not published in a medical journal where it would have been vetted by outside experts in the peer review process.” Ollstein argues that, “Medical experts and abortion-right supporters say it exaggerates the danger of a medication that more than 100 scientific studies have found are safe and effective.”
“Activists on the Zoom call pushed back on those criticisms, arguing that academia is ‘broken’ and they couldn’t trust the peer reviewers not to leak or ‘sabotage’ their effort.”
As the Guardian recently reported, “So far this year, lawmakers in at least 12 states have introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people and leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide – a charge that, in several of these states, carries the death penalty.”
Abortion abolitionists will not be satisfied until all abortions are illegal, abortion pills banned, doctors punished for performing abortions, women stigmatized and criminalized for having abortions, and anyone daring to help a woman get an abortion is punished severely.
In a move that is surprising on the surface, on May 5, Trump Justice Department lawyers asked a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit aimed at restricting access to the abortion pill mifepristone on technical jurisdictional grounds.
Quoted in the NY Times, Mary Ziegler, a law professor and abortion law expert at the University of California, Davis, said that “the Trump administration’s action to dismiss the case is surprising, but I think the best way to read it is that they’re just buying time to figure out what to do about mifepristone.” …She said the filing “avoids saying anything on the substance at all,” and might reflect cautiousness before the mid-term elections.
Rolling Thunder is a blending of legal effort with political muscle, aiming not just to defund Planned Parenthood and close clinics, but to eliminate the most accessible form of abortion care altogether. If successful, it could further fragment reproductive rights across the U.S., deepening the divide between states that protect abortion access and those that seek to eliminate it entirely.
The post Abortion Abolitionists All-Out Campaign to Ban Mifepristone first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz and Gale Bataille.