Pro-life group finds Biden-era FDA policy is driving 500 abortions per day, says Trump has power to end it

FIRST ON FOX: A pro-life group is releasing a new report claiming abortions have continued to rise nationwide since 2020 because of a Biden administration FDA policy that allows abortion pills to be prescribed via telehealth and shipped by mail — a move the group says the Trump administration could reverse.

In a report obtained by Fox News Digital, the Restoration of America Foundation (ROAF) argues that a COVID-era FDA policy under former President Joe Biden is driving an estimated more than 500 mail-order chemical abortions per day, citing data from Guttmacher and WeCount.

The data also shows that chemical abortions now account for the majority of abortions, making up about 63% in 2023, a jump from 39% in 2017.

The report also estimates that there were roughly 170,000 additional abortions in 2024 than would have happened if the abortion rate had remained at 2019 levels.

"Since hitting a low in 2017, the national abortion rate has seen a persistent and troubling climb," the report states. "In 2019, the last full year that abortion by mail was clearly illegal, there were an estimated 916,460 abortions. Using our estimate for 2024, the overall growth in abortion from 2019 to 2024 was 22 percent. Over the same window, the U.S. population grew by just 2.9 percent. Had the abortion rate remained steady from 2019, there would have been 171,103 fewer abortions in 2024."

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The findings show abortion-by-mail made up roughly one in four abortions in the U.S. in the first half of 2025.

WeCount data cited in the report also shows an estimated 244,590 do-it-yourself abortions were facilitated by telehealth in 2024, including more than 120,000 pills sent into states where abortion was restricted or banned after the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, giving the power to make abortion laws back to the states.

The Biden administration policy removed safety standards that required women to see a doctor to be prescribed mifepristone, allowing it to be prescribed through telehealth and sent by mail. The report argues that the FDA under Biden justified the change using limited studies and adverse-event data, despite most mandatory reporting requirements for mifepristone complications being removed in 2016 under the Obama administration. A research paper in 2021 additionally compared adverse-event data with Planned Parenthood data and concluded that the system is "inadequate" to evaluate the safety of mifepristone abortions.

"People are calling up and saying whatever they need to say to get the drug in the mail," ROAF CEO Doug Truax said in an interview with Fox News Digital. "The point that we're making is that abortions are on the rise dramatically; 874,000 in 2023, up to 1.1 million in 2024. Then on this trajectory, by the time President Trump leaves office, it'd be about 1.4 million a year. And so it's largely driven by the drugs going out in the mail."

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"There's about 150 women a day that are being seriously harmed by this drug," Truax continued. "So we need to get them to go see the doctor. The doctor needs to verify where they're at with the pregnancy. Obviously, if it's an ectopic pregnancy, it means they could take this drug, and they could die from it, which has happened. But there are all kinds of sepsis and rupturing and hemorrhaging and everything going on with this drug."

"So there are two angles to this. We're very pro-life over here. We want to go to zero abortions in the country. But the other angle is that this is a women's health issue. So we need to decrease the number of abortions, and we need to basically save women from being harmed by this," he added.

Truax also noted that states with higher populations are receiving the most abortion pills through the mail and that Democrat-led states have enacted shield laws preventing GOP-led states from taking legal action against providers.

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"For instance, Texas, they don't have abortion anymore, but they sure do," he said. "People think it's down to zero. It's not at all. It's about where it was. So you have all these abortionists in, to name a few, Massachusetts and California. There's dispensing organizations now around the country and around the globe that will mail these things out. They're very active getting these abortion drugs into states that said, 'We don't want abortion here.'"

The FDA continues to keep the in-person dispensing requirement for mifepristone suspended — a safety rule that had been in place for roughly 20 years before Biden’s FDA permanently removed it following a COVID-era suspension.

The policy was met with legal challenges under the previous administration, but the Supreme Court allowed it to remain in effect after ruling that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled the FDA’s action under Biden was likely "arbitrary and capricious" under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Truax said the Trump administration has the authority to nix the policy, and urged the federal government to do so.

"I think that from a political standpoint, they'd rather not talk about it. But our point is, from a political standpoint, it's going to start hurting. Pro-life Americans are really grateful to the president for the Supreme Court that we have, they got Roe thrown out, as it should have been a long time ago. But there's more work to be done. We're grateful for defunding Planned Parenthood. That's great for a year. But the bottom line is, if the number of abortions is actually going up and there's a step you could take to stop it, we got to do that," he said.

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"There's a massive number of pro-life Americans that are base supporters of the president who may say, 'Wait a minute, we've been in power for this entire time and the number of abortions keeps going up, and we could have stopped it,'" he added.

Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and state officials have been calling on the Trump administration to take action.

Last summer, more than 20 attorneys general urged Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Marty Makary to complete a safety review of mifepristone and consider reinstating safeguards or removing the drug from the market. Kennedy and Makary vowed to conduct a new review, but they have not released a timeline for the results.

"President Trump, Secretary Kennedy, and Commissioner Makary already have the tools at their disposal to reverse the legally and scientifically dubious decisions of the Biden Administration’s FDA and to reinstate the in-person dispensing requirement. The Trump Administration must act swiftly to restore commonsense medical safeguards to the chemical abortion pill," the ROAF report says.