U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), Chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, alongside Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), led dozens of Republican lawmakers in filing a brief supporting Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill’s lawsuit against the abortion pill.
The brief stands in support of Murrill’s 2025 lawsuit targeting the removal of the in-person dispensing requirement for abortion drugs. The filing calls for the FDA to suspend the Biden-era 2023 policy. According to the lawmakers, “The change was made precisely so that abortionists in pro-abortion states could prescribe and mail abortion drugs to women or girls in pro-life states with tighter regulations on these drugs.”
“The Biden FDA did not have a sufficient evidentiary basis to conclude that eliminating the in-person dispensing requirement was safe,” the brief adds. “And because no in-person visit is required now, women cannot be meaningfully screened for serious contraindications for the use of this drug, such as ectopic pregnancy.”
“I thank Attorney General Murrill for defending women and babies in Louisiana and across the country. Chemical abortion drugs kill innocent children and put mothers’ lives at risk,” said Cassidy. “Safeguards protecting against coercion, such as the in-person dispensing requirement, must be reinstated immediately.”
A 2025 study by the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 1 in 10 women who take mifepristone to induce abortions experience severe complications, a number at least 22 times as high as reported on the drug’s label.
The study, described by the think tank as the “largest-known study of the abortion pill,” found that “10.93 percent of women experience sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or another serious adverse event within 45 days following a mifepristone abortion.” It explained that the “real-world” rate of the serious adverse events is “at least 22 times as high as the summary figure of ‘less than 0.5 percent’ in clinical trials reported on the drug label.”
