Abortion Pill
'Louisiana needs relief now': Oral arguments complete in state's abortion pill case against FDA
Carole Novielli
·Spotlight Articles
Abortion Pill·By Carole Novielli
'Without Guardrails': Report shows most physicians don't prescribe abortion pills
Read part one of this series here.
Twenty-six years after the abortion pill was first approved for use in the United States, the majority of licensed physicians are not eager to become certified prescribers. In fact, less than 1% of licensed physicians are likely to do so.
The drug, mifepristone (200mg)/Mifeprex, was approved in 2000 and requires specific certification under a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety system known as REMS for clinicians to dispense the drug.
Less than one percent of licensed physicians are certified prescribers of the abortion pill.
Potentially 23% of OB/GYNs could be prescribing the abortion pill.
Reasons doctors cite for not prescribing the abortion pill include that there are too many legal regulations associated with abortion, they have concerns about lawsuits and safety or efficacy, and there is no surgical back-up near their office in case of abortion pill complications.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) claims, "In 2024, the United States had 1,032,365 active physicians, of which 866,460 were direct patient care physicians, corresponding to 304 and 255 physicians per 100,000 population, respectively.
A census by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) found that, in 2024, the total population of licensed physicians was approximately 1,082,187. By 2025, that number had risen to 1,098,754, FSMB claimed.
However, very few of them are certified to dispense the abortion pill.
The U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, led by Senator Bill Cassidy, set out to learn how many are certified, and sent requests to Danco Laboratories, GenBioPro (GBP), and Evita Solutions, LLC, which are the sponsors (manufacturers) of the abortion drug mifepristone (200mg)/Mifeprex, asking the following:
How many individuals are currently certified to prescribe Mifeprex in the Mifepristone REMS Program?
How many pharmacies are currently certified to dispense Mifeprex in the Mifepristone REMS Program?
Its August 2026 report, "Mifepristone Without Guardrails: An Investigation Into How Chemical Abortion Drug Makers Are Putting Mothers and Babies At Risk," found that around 8,200 abortion pill prescribers have been certified so far:
Danco: certified 5,250 REMS-certified Mifeprex prescribers and 5,297 REMS-certified pharmacies for Mifeprex, as of September 2025.
GBP: certified 2,950 prescribers of the generic (mifepristone 200mg) and 127 pharmacies.
Evita: certified two pharmacies and no prescribers yet.
In a letter to the committee, GenBioPro (GBP) pointed out that (emphasis added) "the approximately 2,950 Prescriber Forms received by GBP’s distributors and certified pharmacies may reflect duplicate forms submitted to both a distributor and a certified pharmacy, or to multiple pharmacies, and thus may overstate the number of unique prescribers."
Prescribers of the abortion pill are approved and certified to dispense the abortion pill by one (or more) of the three U.S. sponsors (manufacturers) of the drug.
The REMS for mifepristone states (emphasis added):
By signing a Prescriber Agreement Form, prescribers agree they have ability to:
a) assess the duration of pregnancy accurately
b) diagnose ectopic pregnancies
c) provide surgical intervention in cases of incomplete abortion or severe bleeding, or to have made plans to provide such care through others, and ability to assure patient access to medical facilities equipped to provide blood transfusions and resuscitation, if necessary
They must also agree that "they will follow the guidelines for use of mifepristone."
Pharmacy certification is a separate process and is also policed by the drug's sponsors.
The exact number of physicians or clinicians that commit abortions is unclear, as most reporting agencies only document facilities. In March, the Guttmacher Institute claimed, "At the end of 2025, 753 brick-and-mortar clinics were providing abortion services in the United States."
This is down significantly from the early 1980's, according to Pew Research.
However, not all abortion providers are physicians, according to an April 2026 report from Guttmacher Institute:
25 states permit advanced practice clinicians to provide abortion care.
18 of those states place limits on the types of abortion care that can be provided.
26 states explicitly bar advanced practice clinicians from providing abortion care.
All 13 of the states that have total abortion bans also explicitly bar advanced practice clinicians from providing abortion care. In these states, abortion care is provided only under very limited exceptions.
The abortion pill by mail scheme thrust a litany of unregulated virtual abortion pill dispensaries which may not be reflected in those brick-and-mortar numbers above.
Due to the "greying" of abortion providers in the 1990's, the Buffett Foundation funded the Ryan Residency Program, based at the Bixby Center for Global Health at the taxpayer-funded University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). It has boasted that it's trained over 7,000 OBGYN residents to kill preborn children since 1999.
In 1988, the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) was composed of more than "26,000 physicians trained in the specialty of obstetrics and gynecology." By 2026, ACOG's website claimed the organization had "more than 62,000 members across 12 Districts."
ACOG heavily promotes abortion and typically changes its recommendations to support the talking points of the abortion lobby. According to ACOG’s 2022 annual report, their 61,727 members consisted of nearly 35,000 licensed physicians, including:
29,518 board-certified OBGYNs
10,846 OBGYN residents
11,707 medical students
5,452 non-certified OBGYNs or non-obstetric women's health professionals.
Using the approximately 8,200 abortion pill prescribers (even though there is likely overlap between Danco and GBP), potentially 23% of OBGYNs could be prescribing mifepristone/Mifeprex.
Past surveys also confirm that a minority of OBGYNs commit abortions:
In 2019, ACOG’s Green Journal published a study authored by abortionist Daniel Grossman and other abortion industry insiders, utilizing a cross-sectional 2016-17 survey from a national sample of ACOG Fellows. As the LA Times noted, “fewer than 1 in 4 were willing and able to perform [an abortion] themselves,” and “[a]mong the doctors who answered questions about the procedure, 1 in 3 cited personal, religious or moral reasons for not providing abortion services.”
A Green Journal commentary published in 2022 stated that “abortion provision is not a routine part of most general ob-gyn practices; currently, only 14–24% of ob-gyns perform abortions.”
A 2023 report issued by the pro-abortion Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) claimed that “Nearly one in five (18%) office-based OBGYNs nationally say that they are providing abortion services” since the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. The Foundation added, “Nationally, 14% of OBGYNs say they provide in-person medication abortions, but only 5% say they provide telehealth medication abortions.” (KFF is
ACOG has been accurately defined by the pro-life American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) as an “abortion advocacy” organization which is “no longer objective on the abortion issue” and “does not adequately represent its thousands of members.”
And, as Live Action News previously documented, less than 25% of ACOG’s membership in 2019 was willing to provide abortions.
"The number of mifepristone providers increased from 208 in the last [two] months of 2000 to 700 in 2001, the first full year of availability, and to 902 in 2007," an Obstetrics & Gynecology report claimed.
Live Action News previously detailed how, at the time the abortion pill was first approved (2000), the industry believed that doctors would be willing to prescribe the regimen — but they were wrong. By 2001, The Washington Post wrote:
At one time, the most ambitious argument for RU-486 was that it would move abortion away from clinics (and clinic protesters) and into the offices of more private OB-GYNs and family practitioners. But there have been signs all along that this is not likely: In a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, doctors tended to be less willing to administer RU-486 the more they knew about it.
Reasons gynecologists gave to Kaiser (now called KFF.org) included:
There are too many legal regulations associated with abortion.
Concerns about lawsuits and safety or efficacy.
No surgical back-up near office in case of abortion pill complications.
An October 2001 USA Today article quoted Florida abortionist Robert Livingston claiming he wasn't offering the drug because "[y]ou get a reputation if you have a couple of patients who show up bleeding in the emergency room."
As late as 2016, abortion pill manufacturer Danco’s director of marketing and public affairs, Abigail Long, told Forbes that Danco’s representatives regularly encounter physicians who say they simply send their abortion-seeking patients to Planned Parenthood.
Fast forward to 2019, little had changed when abortionist Daniel Grossman told Ms. Magazine that one reason OB-GYNs did not offer the abortion pill is that they do not want to stock it in their facilities.
“For many health care providers across the country, registering with the drug manufacturer and stocking Mifeprex at their office is difficult or impossible,” a 2017 lawsuit challenging the REMS on behalf of Hawaiian doctor Graham T. Chelius claimed, adding:
“Some are deterred by the logistics of being ‘certified’ by a drug manufacturer, entering into a contract with the drug distribution company, and ordering the medication—a process unfamiliar to many clinicians because it is required for such a small number of drugs, and which can be particularly complicated and time-consuming for clinicians at large health care institutions.”
In June of 2000, prior to FDA approval of the drug, Dr. Eric Schaff, a professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester who ran clinical trials on the abortion pill, stated the real goal out loud:
It kills the drug if it can't be used by primary care providers.
The whole idea of mifepristone was to increase [abortion] access.
The profitable abortion drug industry recognized decades ago that removing guardrails on the abortion pill, including certification and in-person dispensing requirements under REMS, would result in more abortions. And the data reveals they were correct.
Because this was never about health and safety; it's about increasing abortion.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Older surveys found similar results.
Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·
Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·
Abortion Pill
Nancy Flanders
·Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·
Investigative
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill·By Carole Novielli
'Without Guardrails': Report shows most physicians don't prescribe abortion pills
Read part one of this series here.
Twenty-six years after the abortion pill was first approved for use in the United States, the majority of licensed physicians are not eager to become certified prescribers. In fact, less than 1% of licensed physicians are likely to do so.
The drug, mifepristone (200mg)/Mifeprex, was approved in 2000 and requires specific certification under a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety system known as REMS for clinicians to dispense the drug.
Less than one percent of licensed physicians are certified prescribers of the abortion pill.
Potentially 23% of OB/GYNs could be prescribing the abortion pill.
Reasons doctors cite for not prescribing the abortion pill include that there are too many legal regulations associated with abortion, they have concerns about lawsuits and safety or efficacy, and there is no surgical back-up near their office in case of abortion pill complications.
The Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) claims, "In 2024, the United States had 1,032,365 active physicians, of which 866,460 were direct patient care physicians, corresponding to 304 and 255 physicians per 100,000 population, respectively.
A census by the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) found that, in 2024, the total population of licensed physicians was approximately 1,082,187. By 2025, that number had risen to 1,098,754, FSMB claimed.
However, very few of them are certified to dispense the abortion pill.
The U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, led by Senator Bill Cassidy, set out to learn how many are certified, and sent requests to Danco Laboratories, GenBioPro (GBP), and Evita Solutions, LLC, which are the sponsors (manufacturers) of the abortion drug mifepristone (200mg)/Mifeprex, asking the following:
How many individuals are currently certified to prescribe Mifeprex in the Mifepristone REMS Program?
How many pharmacies are currently certified to dispense Mifeprex in the Mifepristone REMS Program?
Its August 2026 report, "Mifepristone Without Guardrails: An Investigation Into How Chemical Abortion Drug Makers Are Putting Mothers and Babies At Risk," found that around 8,200 abortion pill prescribers have been certified so far:
Danco: certified 5,250 REMS-certified Mifeprex prescribers and 5,297 REMS-certified pharmacies for Mifeprex, as of September 2025.
GBP: certified 2,950 prescribers of the generic (mifepristone 200mg) and 127 pharmacies.
Evita: certified two pharmacies and no prescribers yet.
In a letter to the committee, GenBioPro (GBP) pointed out that (emphasis added) "the approximately 2,950 Prescriber Forms received by GBP’s distributors and certified pharmacies may reflect duplicate forms submitted to both a distributor and a certified pharmacy, or to multiple pharmacies, and thus may overstate the number of unique prescribers."
Prescribers of the abortion pill are approved and certified to dispense the abortion pill by one (or more) of the three U.S. sponsors (manufacturers) of the drug.
The REMS for mifepristone states (emphasis added):
By signing a Prescriber Agreement Form, prescribers agree they have ability to:
a) assess the duration of pregnancy accurately
b) diagnose ectopic pregnancies
c) provide surgical intervention in cases of incomplete abortion or severe bleeding, or to have made plans to provide such care through others, and ability to assure patient access to medical facilities equipped to provide blood transfusions and resuscitation, if necessary
They must also agree that "they will follow the guidelines for use of mifepristone."
Pharmacy certification is a separate process and is also policed by the drug's sponsors.
The exact number of physicians or clinicians that commit abortions is unclear, as most reporting agencies only document facilities. In March, the Guttmacher Institute claimed, "At the end of 2025, 753 brick-and-mortar clinics were providing abortion services in the United States."
This is down significantly from the early 1980's, according to Pew Research.
However, not all abortion providers are physicians, according to an April 2026 report from Guttmacher Institute:
25 states permit advanced practice clinicians to provide abortion care.
18 of those states place limits on the types of abortion care that can be provided.
26 states explicitly bar advanced practice clinicians from providing abortion care.
All 13 of the states that have total abortion bans also explicitly bar advanced practice clinicians from providing abortion care. In these states, abortion care is provided only under very limited exceptions.
The abortion pill by mail scheme thrust a litany of unregulated virtual abortion pill dispensaries which may not be reflected in those brick-and-mortar numbers above.
Due to the "greying" of abortion providers in the 1990's, the Buffett Foundation funded the Ryan Residency Program, based at the Bixby Center for Global Health at the taxpayer-funded University of California-San Francisco (UCSF). It has boasted that it's trained over 7,000 OBGYN residents to kill preborn children since 1999.
In 1988, the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) was composed of more than "26,000 physicians trained in the specialty of obstetrics and gynecology." By 2026, ACOG's website claimed the organization had "more than 62,000 members across 12 Districts."
ACOG heavily promotes abortion and typically changes its recommendations to support the talking points of the abortion lobby. According to ACOG’s 2022 annual report, their 61,727 members consisted of nearly 35,000 licensed physicians, including:
29,518 board-certified OBGYNs
10,846 OBGYN residents
11,707 medical students
5,452 non-certified OBGYNs or non-obstetric women's health professionals.
Using the approximately 8,200 abortion pill prescribers (even though there is likely overlap between Danco and GBP), potentially 23% of OBGYNs could be prescribing mifepristone/Mifeprex.
Past surveys also confirm that a minority of OBGYNs commit abortions:
In 2019, ACOG’s Green Journal published a study authored by abortionist Daniel Grossman and other abortion industry insiders, utilizing a cross-sectional 2016-17 survey from a national sample of ACOG Fellows. As the LA Times noted, “fewer than 1 in 4 were willing and able to perform [an abortion] themselves,” and “[a]mong the doctors who answered questions about the procedure, 1 in 3 cited personal, religious or moral reasons for not providing abortion services.”
A Green Journal commentary published in 2022 stated that “abortion provision is not a routine part of most general ob-gyn practices; currently, only 14–24% of ob-gyns perform abortions.”
A 2023 report issued by the pro-abortion Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) claimed that “Nearly one in five (18%) office-based OBGYNs nationally say that they are providing abortion services” since the Dobbs ruling overturned Roe v. Wade. The Foundation added, “Nationally, 14% of OBGYNs say they provide in-person medication abortions, but only 5% say they provide telehealth medication abortions.” (KFF is
ACOG has been accurately defined by the pro-life American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) as an “abortion advocacy” organization which is “no longer objective on the abortion issue” and “does not adequately represent its thousands of members.”
And, as Live Action News previously documented, less than 25% of ACOG’s membership in 2019 was willing to provide abortions.
"The number of mifepristone providers increased from 208 in the last [two] months of 2000 to 700 in 2001, the first full year of availability, and to 902 in 2007," an Obstetrics & Gynecology report claimed.
Live Action News previously detailed how, at the time the abortion pill was first approved (2000), the industry believed that doctors would be willing to prescribe the regimen — but they were wrong. By 2001, The Washington Post wrote:
At one time, the most ambitious argument for RU-486 was that it would move abortion away from clinics (and clinic protesters) and into the offices of more private OB-GYNs and family practitioners. But there have been signs all along that this is not likely: In a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation, doctors tended to be less willing to administer RU-486 the more they knew about it.
Reasons gynecologists gave to Kaiser (now called KFF.org) included:
There are too many legal regulations associated with abortion.
Concerns about lawsuits and safety or efficacy.
No surgical back-up near office in case of abortion pill complications.
An October 2001 USA Today article quoted Florida abortionist Robert Livingston claiming he wasn't offering the drug because "[y]ou get a reputation if you have a couple of patients who show up bleeding in the emergency room."
As late as 2016, abortion pill manufacturer Danco’s director of marketing and public affairs, Abigail Long, told Forbes that Danco’s representatives regularly encounter physicians who say they simply send their abortion-seeking patients to Planned Parenthood.
Fast forward to 2019, little had changed when abortionist Daniel Grossman told Ms. Magazine that one reason OB-GYNs did not offer the abortion pill is that they do not want to stock it in their facilities.
“For many health care providers across the country, registering with the drug manufacturer and stocking Mifeprex at their office is difficult or impossible,” a 2017 lawsuit challenging the REMS on behalf of Hawaiian doctor Graham T. Chelius claimed, adding:
“Some are deterred by the logistics of being ‘certified’ by a drug manufacturer, entering into a contract with the drug distribution company, and ordering the medication—a process unfamiliar to many clinicians because it is required for such a small number of drugs, and which can be particularly complicated and time-consuming for clinicians at large health care institutions.”
In June of 2000, prior to FDA approval of the drug, Dr. Eric Schaff, a professor of family medicine at the University of Rochester who ran clinical trials on the abortion pill, stated the real goal out loud:
It kills the drug if it can't be used by primary care providers.
The whole idea of mifepristone was to increase [abortion] access.
The profitable abortion drug industry recognized decades ago that removing guardrails on the abortion pill, including certification and in-person dispensing requirements under REMS, would result in more abortions. And the data reveals they were correct.
Because this was never about health and safety; it's about increasing abortion.
Live Action News is pro-life news and commentary from a pro-life perspective.
Our work is possible because of our donors. Please consider giving to further our work of changing hearts and minds on issues of life and human dignity.
Contact editor@liveaction.org for questions, corrections, or if you are seeking permission to reprint any Live Action News content.
Guest Articles: To submit a guest article to Live Action News, email editor@liveaction.org with an attached Word document of 800-1000 words. Please also attach any photos relevant to your submission if applicable. If your submission is accepted for publication, you will be notified within three weeks. Guest articles are not compensated (see our Open License Agreement). Thank you for your interest in Live Action News!
Older surveys found similar results.
Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill
Nancy Flanders
·
Abortion Pill
Bridget Sielicki
·
Abortion Pill
Nancy Flanders
·Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·Investigative
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·
Investigative
Carole Novielli
·
Abortion Pill
Carole Novielli
·Abortion Pill
Bridget Sielicki
·Investigative
Carole Novielli
·