Days after FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said that the agency planned to review the safety of abortion pill mifepristone, attorneys general from four pro-abortion states have fired back, filing (PDF) a petition asking the U.S. regulator to lift restrictions on the treatment.
The goal of the petition, according to The New York Times, is not necessarily to erase the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) restrictions on mifepristone, but instead to force the FDA to review and acknowledge the voluminous data demonstrating the safety of the pill, which has been on the market for 25 years.
The Times cites an anonymous source from the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, who is working on the petition. The other state attorneys who have signed onto the effort are from California, New Jersey and New York.
The purpose of the petition is in part to debunk a report from the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an anti-abortion conservative think tank, which questions the safety of mifepristone and has gained traction with anti-abortionists, even though it lacks the peer-reviewed stamp of approval generally required to legitimize such data. While the report analyzes insurance claims data, it doesn’t reveal the source of the information.
