RFK Jr. Accidentally Reveals Trump's Plan on Abortion
Kennedy drops hints on mifepristone, emergency abortion, and the possibility of a national ban in his Senate confirmation hearing.
Here we go: At his confirmation hearing today, RFK Jr. revealed how the Trump administration is thinking about restricting abortion—dropping hints not just about mifepristone, but abortion ‘complication’ reporting, emergency abortions, and the possibility of a national ban. (Yes, really.)
Watch key excerpts here with more details below, and click to skip ahead to a particular section: Mifepristone, Abortion Reporting, Emergency Abortions, National Ban on ‘Late’ Abortions
Mifepristone
Kennedy, Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the president wants him to look at “safety issues” around mifepristone:
“President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone. He has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it. Whenever he does, I will implement those policies."
As you likely know, mifepristone has been safely used to end pregnancies for decades, and all credible studies show that the drug is safe and effective. But anti-abortion groups claim otherwise, publishing misleading and false ‘research’ that says the medication puts women’s health and lives in danger.
In fact, their studies are so false that they’ve been retracted by publishers. But anti-abortion activists know Americans overwhelmingly oppose abortion bans, so they see feigning concern for women’s health as their best shot at restricting the medication.
Kennedy’s claim that Trump wants to “study” mifepristone’s safety signals that the White House will use a similar strategy when making their own moves against the medication. Whatever rollbacks they impose, they’ll frame as being in women’s best interest.
That might mean reinstating the FDA’s pre-2016 restrictions on mifepristone, limiting its use to the first 7 weeks of pregnancy and requiring patients to see a provider in person—effectively blocking access to abortion pills by mail. Republicans could also invoke the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of abortion medication, framing it as a measure to ‘protect’ women from a so-called ‘dangerous’ drug.
Abortion Reporting
It wasn’t just Kennedy’s answers that signaled the White House’s next moves—the GOP’s loaded questions did, too. A key hint came when two Republican senators raised concerns about the “adverse” side effects of mifepristone, implying that women aren’t being properly warned about potential risks.
Sen. James Lankford, for example, claimed the FDA doesn’t report on mifepristone complications unless someone dies. “Literally, don’t give transparent information to the American people or to the women who take this drug anymore, we don’t want that reported,” he said.
And Sen. Steve Daines laid in the FDA for supposedly “ending reporting requirements for adverse events,” claiming that “3 to 5% of women taking this drug end up in the emergency room.”
In response, Kennedy said, “I think it’s immoral to have a policy where patients are not allowed to report adverse events or doctors are discouraged from doing that.”
Leaving aside the misleading statistic about emergency rooms for a moment (which I debunk here), it’s simply not true that the FDA prohibits reporting adverse events or that they ended reporting requirements for the drug. What the agency did do is to eliminate extra reporting requirements; that means adverse events for mifepristone are reported in the same way as all other prescriptions medications.
These lies come straight from anti-abortion groups like Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and the Charlotte Lozier Institute. They push for burdensome, unnecessary reporting rules that deliberately—and falsely— inflate abortion ‘complication’ rates.
In fact, Abortion, Every Day has warned many times over about Republicans’ plan to use fake ‘complication’ data to restrict abortion; and it’s something that’s already happening in multiple states.
The fact that two GOP senators pressed Kennedy on mifepristone side effects and reporting—and that he responded the way he did—signals that Republicans and the Trump administration are gearing up for a major push on this issue. And because abortion reporting features heavily in Project 2025, we already have a preview of their playbook: The conservative roadmap calls for funding for studies on the “risks and complications of abortion,” research that “explores the harms, both mental and physical, that abortion has wrought on women and girls,” and a mandate that the CDC collect data on “abortion-related maternal deaths.”
Emergency Abortions
Another key moment today came when Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto questioned Kennedy about the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA) and abortion care in hospital emergency rooms. First, the Democratic senator asked Kennedy if he agreed that EMTALA requires emergency rooms to treat a woman having a heart attack. Kennedy answered yes, without hesitation. Then she asked this:
“Now a pregnant woman with life threatening bleeding from an incomplete miscarriage goes to the ER, and her doctor also determines that she needs an emergency abortion, but she's in a state where abortion is banned. You would agree also as an attorney that federal law protects her right to that emergency care, correct?”
Kennedy’s answer? “I don't know. I, I mean, the answer to that is I don't know.”
He doesn’t know. Here’s the thing: I think he does know. I think he knows that the Trump administration has no intention of ensuring hospitals provide life-saving abortions, and is (badly) avoiding the question.
Anti-abortion activists and politicians want to divorce abortion from healthcare; they claim abortion is never necessary to save a person’s health or life. They’ve been pushing this dangerous lie using more of the fake studies they’re so fond of, and in legislative language that redefines abortion.
The Trump administration has already signaled they’re adopting this stance: A recent executive order attacked a Biden directive for “recategoriz[ing] abortion as ‘healthcare.’”
Between that and Kennedy’s non-answer, we have every reason to believe the White House won’t enforce EMTALA—giving anti-abortion states a free pass to prosecute ER doctors for providing life-saving abortions.
National Ban on ‘Late’ Abortions
I want to end by looking at the least explicit (but perhaps most worrying) clue that Kennedy dropped today:
“I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy. I agree with him that we cannot be a moral nation if we have 1.2 million abortions a year. I agree with him that the states should control abortion. President Trump has told me he wants to end late term abortions.”
On the surface, this may seem like an innocuous statement. But given the context—and everything we know about anti-abortion language tricks—Kennedy’s comments are a lot more troubling than they first appear.
How, precisely, will Trump “end late term abortions?” And why does that assertion directly follow Kennedy’s assurance that “the states should control abortion.”
To me, this is a clear hint that Trump is open to a national abortion ban if it’s framed as restricting ‘late’ abortions. Especially when you remember that anti-abortion groups have been laying the groundwork for exactly that.
Since 2023, Abortion, Every Day has tracked how anti-abortion activists increasingly define late’ abortion as anything after the first trimester. Because it’s not a real medical term in the first place, these groups have been able to characterize ‘late’ or ‘late term’ abortion however they want without pushback.
The primary reason they’ve advanced the definition? So that Republicans can propose a national abortion ban at 15 weeks while claiming it’s simply a move to curb ‘late’ abortion. Remember ‘minimum national standard’?
In 2023, for example, the Charlotte Lozier Institute published a paper arguing for a national 15-week ban by calling it a “Federal Limit on Late Abortion.” And when Trump made noise about supporting a 15-week ban in early 2024, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said, “President Trump is right: protecting babies from painful late-term abortions is a place of national consensus.” (If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that ‘consensus’ = ’national ban.’)
Finally, this is a tactic that Republicans used when they reworked the GOP platform’s abortion plank! As I noted at the time, Trump’s team—facing voter backlash over bans—played the media by claiming they removed the call for a national ban. In reality, they just swapped the explicit ban language for a push for fetal personhood and opposition to “late-term abortion.”
The day after the GOP adopted that abortion plank, one of the men who drafted the language bragged about the slick switch-up. Ed Martin talked about the platform’s “opposition to a late term abortion, however you define that.” (Emphasis mine)
“I call a late term abortion any abortion that is done after the baby is conceived, myself, in part because the term ‘late term abortion’ and some of the distinction of trimesters and all that was Roe v. Wade construct—it was made-up.”
All of which is to say: Trump’s team and anti-abortion groups have been working to make it easier for him to sign a national abortion ban by shifting the language around what qualifies as ‘late’ abortion. So when Kennedy says Trump opposes ‘late’ abortion, there’s a lot more behind that statement than it seems.
Confirmed or not, Kennedy just handed us a roadmap for Trump’s next moves on abortion. We do well not to turn away.
Someone need to tell RFK, Jr that a "moral" nation would treat women as fully human and as people with the agency to make their oen decisions.
A "moral" nation doesn't force women to carry dead or dying fetal tissue until that tissue kills them.
Every time I read stuff like this it just sets my hair on fire. Deliberately playing a semantics game to push their cause. They know when people hear “late term abortion” they will think something like 3rd trimester not 15 weeks. They’re so smarmy about it too. Assholes.