Trump Claims He’s Committed To Keeping Abortion Pills Accessible

Donald Trump gave his clearest answer to date about the future of abortion pills under his administration in a new interview with Time magazine.

When asked if he would commit to making sure that abortion pills will continue to be accessible through the Food and Drug Administration, the president-elect responded: “That would be my commitment. Yeah, it’s always been my commitment.”

Trump’s comment is the most forthright he’s been about ensuring continued access to medication abortion under his administration. But in typical Trump manner, he hedged a lot before actually making the commitment, initially telling Time that his administration is “going to take a look at that” when asked to promise that his FDA would safeguard abortion pills.

Later, when pressed about his answer, Trump said it’s “unlikely, very unlikely” that his FDA would strip access to abortion pills. He continued his waffling:

I guess I could say probably as close to ruling it out as possible, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to do anything now. I want to do it at some point. There will be a time in the future where people are going to know everything about subjects like that, which are very complex subjects for people, because you have other people that, you know, they feel strongly both ways, really strongly both ways, and those are the things that are dividing up the country. But you know my stand from a very long, hard thing, and I think it’s highly unlikely that I ever change that.

Abortion pills, or the combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, have been at the center of GOP attacks on abortion access since Roe v. Wade fell in 2022. Trump has boasted repeatedly about his role in repealing federal abortion protections, which allowed nearly 20 states to enact abortion bans. Trump allies outlined in Project 2025 how they hoped the president-elect would restrict abortion care, laying out plans to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone under a second Trump administration ― a fight that anti-abortion advocates took all the way to the Supreme Court this summer.

Trump’s comments to Time suggest he may be breaking with more extreme anti-abortion advocates now that he’s won reelection.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the national anti-abortion organization SBA Pro-Life America, reiterated her group’s support of criminalizing abortion pills in response to Trump’s comments.

“Unregulated, mail-order abortion drugs are a serious and growing threat to women’s health and safety, as well as the lives of countless unborn children, all across this country ― made possible by the reckless actions of the Biden-Harris administration,” Dannenfelser wrote in an email to HuffPost.

“Even the pro-abortion media can’t hide that these drugs are killing women and fueling dangerous new forms of domestic violence,” she continued. “Because the profit-driven abortion industry will sell high-risk drugs to anyone with a zip code over the web, ‘completely free of face-to-face interaction with a clinician,’ it is absurdly easy for traffickers and abusers to get their hands on them. No one who cares about the health and well-being of women can afford to ignore this issue.”

Students for Life Action, another large anti-abortion group, referred HuffPost to a comment the organization gave Fox News earlier this week regarding similar remarks Trump made about abortion pills.

“President Trump has shown himself to be a reasonable leader who makes decisions based on the best information available,” Kristan Hawkins, the group’s president, said in the statement. “And we hope to be agents of change, providing new information about how the changes made by the Biden-Harris Administration on Chemical Abortion Pill policy expose women to injury, infertility, and death, empowers abusers and allows for drinking water pollution through the flushing of medical waste.” (There is no evidence to corroborate the claim that abortion pills harm people through wastewater.)

Under the Biden administration, the FDA lifted its in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone, allowing people to access abortion pills through the mail. The FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, and the medication has since been used by nearly 6 million people in the U.S., according to the department. Mifepristone and misoprostol are more than 95% effective and pose fewer risks than Tylenol. Major medical groups have repeatedly said mifepristone is safe, pointing to more than 100 studies that have corroborated its safety and effectiveness.

If Trump keeps his word and does not restrict access to abortion pills through the FDA, there are still other ways he could attack them. Also included in Project 2025 was a plan to invoke the Comstock Act — a 150-year-old law that criminalizes sending “obscene” materials in the mail, including anything “intended for producing abortion.” This would create a backdoor abortion ban overnight, and the president-elect would not need to go through the FDA to do it.