The Trump administration is not pro-life. Why?

President Donald Trump is continuing his consistently inconsistent stance on abortion as his administration’s Justice Department has asked a federal court in Texas to dismiss a case aiming to increase regulations on mifepristone, an abortion pill shown in some rare cases to involve serious health risks.

Trump has claimed many times in the past to be pro-life, even saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for abortions. Yet at a time when he seems more than willing to shoot for the moon on pretty much every other policy, his administration is pumping the brakes on a pro-life measure that seeks to restrict the use of abortion pills from up to 10 weeks of pregnancy to seven weeks, and would once again require a woman to acquire the pills from a doctor; currently, mifepristone can be bought online and delivered through the mail.

Fox News reports Idaho, Kansas and Missouri “are challenging FDA actions that loosened restrictions on the drug in 2016 and 2021.” In its brief, the DoJ asserts the case should be thrown out because these states “have no connection to the Northern District of Texas.”

Several outlets have pointed out that though the Trump administration is continuing President Joe Biden’s legacy of safeguarding access to mifepristone, at least for now, the DoJ “did not debate the legality of the pill or defend its use,” per USA Today.

Trump said recently that this second term will be his last, but interfering in the mifepristone battle has to make you wonder. This is a president who, after all, appointed many pro-life judges and took credit for overturning Roe v. Wade, saying, “Without me the pro-life movement would have just kept losing.” Within the first weeks of his second term in office, Trump also signed an executive order “to end the use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion.”

Politico posits Trump’s action in this and other cases is “about preserving executive power and preventing courts from second-guessing agency decisions.” But in its filing on the mifepristone case, the DoJ went above and beyond questioning the states’ proper proceedings by stating their complaint “fails for additional threshold reasons,” because “they failed to exhaust their claims; and their challenge to FDA’s 2016 actions is outside the six-year statute of limitations.”

In his December 2024 TIME Person of the Year interview, Trump committed to “making sure that the FDA does not strip [women’s] ability to access abortion pills.” Yet stripping a woman of her ability to access abortion pills and putting back into place commonsense restrictions to discourage abortions and protect mothers’ lives are two different things.

Perhaps Trump is fine with mifepristone because popping a pill to end a pregnancy presents a less grisly picture than a surgical abortion. Or perhaps he’s unaware of how dangerous the abortion pill is. The mainstream media certainly isn’t publicizing it. Yet, as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri told The Spectator last week, adverse events caused by mifepristone are “22 times higher than what the FDA label says.

“These are astounding numbers,” Hawley said. “And… we’re not talking about a stomach ache. We’re talking here about hemorrhaging. We’re talking about life-threatening complications because of this drug… The reason that all of these safety procedures and guardrails were in place was because of just how dangerous chemical abortions are. So my message to the administration is: those safety regulations need to go back into effect.”

Then again, it’s hard to believe the Trump and his administration are simply ignorant of mifepristone’s effects. As the drug now accounts for 63 percent of abortions, it’s more likely he’s afraid of losing the support of voters who elected him for his “moderate” stance on abortion.