Amid efforts to restrict mifepristone access, here's what studies say about the medication

Legal challenges to mifepristone, the first of two pills used in medication abortions, have some Republican politicians questioning the drug’s safety.

In 2023, the Food and Drug Administration stopped requiring doctors to dispense mifepristone in person, allowing it to be prescribed via telehealth appointments and delivered by mail. That remains the situation, even in states where abortion is banned — although that could change. Some states have filed legal challenges arguing mifepristone access undermines their abortion restrictions. 

As the lawsuits move through the courts, Republican U.S. senators have exaggerated mifepristone’s health risks, sometimes saying 1 in 10 women experience serious complications or must go to the emergency room after taking it. The figure comes from a report by a conservative nonprofit that opposes abortion; it wasn’t published in a peer-reviewed medical journal, and over 250 reproductive health researchers criticized it for methodological issues and its failure to disclose its data source.

The Trump administration’s top health officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., promised to again review mifepristone’s safety last year, though health agencies have so far released no new review. 

We examined existing research about the medication’s risks and safety profile. The bottom line: In general, it is safe.

Decades of data show mifepristone’s safety and effectiveness

More than 100 studies spanning over 30 years have found medication abortion, which includes using mifepristone, to be safe and effective. Medication abortions successfully end pregnancies about 95% of the time. 

The FDA approved Mifeprex — the brand name for mifepristone — after a comprehensive review of its scientific evidence. The agency has monitored the safety data on mifepristone since it approved the drug in September 2000 to terminate pregnancies. 

A quarter of a century later, the FDA has "not identified any new safety concerns" with Mifeprex or the approved generic mifepristone to terminate pregnancies through 70 days gestation, the agency said in an online Q&A last reviewed in April 2026.

"We’ve been using mifepristone in the U.S. for over two decades and we aren’t seeing legitimate studies that are documenting any medical fallout or medical complications from this drug," Rachel Jones, a Guttmacher Institute principal research scientist, told PolitiFact in November. The institute is a research organization that supports reproductive rights.

A patient prepares to take the first of two combination pills, mifepristone, for a medication abortion during a visit to a clinic in Kansas City, Kan., on, Oct. 12, 2022. (AP)

Serious complications from medication abortions are rare, research shows

Most people who use medication, including mifepristone, to terminate a pregnancy do not experience serious complications. 

When The New York Times analyzed 101 studies on medication abortion, it found the vast majority showed that over 99% of patients who took the pills had no serious complications, which might include hospitalization, blood transfusion or a major surgery.

A 2013 study by researchers at Princeton, University of California, Davis, and University of Hull in the United Kingdom examined 233,805 medication abortions by Planned Parenthood in 2009 and 2010. It found that 99.34% of those abortions "were completed with no known complications." 

In 0.1% of cases in the study, patients needed emergency department treatment following a medication abortion, and 0.6% of cases required hospital admission.

A 2015 study published in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology examined emergency room visits and complications and found that out of nearly 55,000 abortions — medication and in-clinic procedures — the complication rate was about 2.1%, and most were minor. 

Out of about 11,000 medication abortion cases examined in that study, 5.2% had complications, and most were "minor and expected," it said. Major complications occurred in 35 cases, or 0.3%. 

RELATED: Fact-checking Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier on abortion pill hospitalizations