The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced that the long-awaited safety study on Mifepristone — which the FDA formerly claimed was as harmless as taking an over-the-counter painkiller — is officially underway.

Mifepristone is the most common mail-order abortion drug. According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortion pills accounted for 65% of all abortions in the U.S. under former President Joe Biden. The drug was made available to the public without women having to visit a doctor’s office to receive it. It can be prescribed virtually via telehealth and received in the mail.

This policy move was seen by the pro-abortion lobby as “progress” because women can now kill their preborn babies from the comfort of their own homes. In reality, it made women exponentially more vulnerable to abuse, suffering, and even death.

Mail-order abortion pills are ridiculously easy for people to acquire. As a result, they come with their own set of dangers.

They are underregulated, and people with bad intentions have forced their pregnant wives, girlfriends, daughters, or sisters to take the pills against their will.

The pills are horrible psychologically, too, because women have to face the trauma from an abortion completely alone. But it’s not only their psyche that is wounded — these women often have no quick access to medical help if they suffer side effects, which can range from non-fatal (infections, infertility) to extremely dangerous (hemorrhages, sepsis).

More and more women are electing to take abortion pills because Mifepristone has been sold as a low-risk option. The FDA previously claimed that the risk of experiencing harmful or dangerous side effects was only 0.5%. However, a separate study conducted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) found that the percentage of women who are hospitalized with harmful or dangerous side effects is actually 11%. In other words, more than one in 10 women could have a serious side effect beyond the killing of her preborn child. That is a significant disparity.

Pro-lifers have been calling on Donald Trump’s FDA to do a more thorough safety study on the abortion pill. The hope is 1) that it will concur with the EPPC study; 2) that abortion pills will be regulated and overseen by doctors; and 3) that chemical abortions will no longer be a prolific means of killing children and potentially their mothers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promised that this study would occur back in the fall, and the slow-walking under former FDA head Dr. Marty Makary was a major cause of complaint among pro-lifers. However, with Makary’s resignation in May, there was great hope that this study would gain traction. It seems that it has.

The study will take six months, which means the results should come in after the midterms — which was probably intentional. Another interesting tidbit that came to light with the announcement was that the FDA was compiling data continuously to determine whether a safety study was even feasible. In other words, the FDA is arguing that pro-lifers were complaining about nothing because it has been laying the groundwork the whole time.

A spokesperson told reporters, “Any reporting suggesting otherwise, including that a study is just being started, is either false or based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how complex scientific safety studies work.”

Whether the study has just gotten underway or has been in its first stage for months, pro-lifers are excited about the potential to save more lives, increase accountability, and perhaps roll back policies regarding Mifepristone’s distribution.

This safety study is hopefully the first fruit of more good news to come in the fight for life.