Washington, D.C. — Today U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee and a senior member and former chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, issued the following statement in response to the Fifth Circuit ruling that, as of now, has resulted in requiring patients nationwide to fill mifepristone prescriptions in-person at a health center:
“Mifepristone is safe and effective—millions of women have used this medication since the FDA approved it over 25 years ago. The only reason mifepristone is regulated as heavily as it already is, is because of anti-abortion politics, not because of science. Yet Republican anti-abortion extremists will stop at nothing to rip this basic health care away from women in America. Let’s be clear about what just happened: three judges on the most extreme appeals court in the country sided with anti-abortion politicians over the FDA’s career scientists, over a quarter-century of safety data, over millions of American women who have safely used mifepristone, and over practically every major medical association in the United States.
“The real-world consequences of this decision are devastating and immediate—and it is beyond infuriating and infantilizing what these judges are forcing women to do. A patient in rural Washington who was going to receive her medication by mail, now has to find a clinic, take time off work, arrange childcare, and travel—sometimes hours—for a pill she could have safely taken at home. A woman managing a miscarriage will be forced to make that same trip in the middle of one of the worst weeks of her life.
“This should not be a country where women’s access to health care is determined by the whims of a few zealous anti-abortion judges with zero medical or scientific training—do Americans really want a country where a panel of judges get to decide what medicine we can or can’t take? What’s next: cancer drugs? HIV medication? Let’s be eyes wide open that Republicans will accept nothing short of a national abortion ban—I will be fighting to ensure access to medication abortion every single way possible and to restore the right to abortion in every state for every woman.”
Two-thirds of U.S. adults oppose banning medication abortion. The overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want abortion legislated at all.
Senator Murray leads the Democratic caucus on reproductive health care issues, and she has led the fight in Congress to protect and expand access to mifepristone. Senator Murray led the Congressional response to FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a lawsuit brought by Republican anti-abortion extremists trying to rip away access to mifepristone—Murray led multiple amicus briefs, organized her colleagues, and raised the alarm at every turn. In June 2024, the Supreme Court dismissed the case on standing, but Murray made clear that “the nationwide threat to medication abortion has not gone away—far from it. If Donald Trump and his anti-abortion allies return to power, they will do everything they can to rip away access to mifepristone and ban abortion nationwide.”
Senator Murray has grilled Trump’s FDA Commissioner, Marty Makary, on access to mifepristone at every opportunity she’s had—including at a HELP Committee hearing on his nomination in March, and an Appropriations Agriculture-FDA subcommittee hearing in May. In 2023, Senator Murray pressed national pharmacies including Costco to ensure access to mifepristone, and in August, when Costco announced it would no longer sell mifepristone at its stores, Murray spoke out to demand they reverse course.
In November of 2025, Senator Murray led the entire Senate Democratic caucus in a letter to HHS Secretary Kennedy and FDA Commissioner Makary expressing alarm over the Trump administration’s plans to conduct “its own review of the evidence” on the safety and effectiveness of mifepristone. Murray’s letter laid into the recent junk science “report” on mifepristone put out by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)—an avowedly anti-abortion think tank—that appears to be the basis for the Trump administration’s announced review of mifepristone. “By elevating the sham EPPC report as rationale for restricting access to mifepristone, HHS is blatantly undermining well-established science and weaponizing disinformation to fit the Trump administration’s clear agenda to cut off abortion access in any way possible,” Murray and the senators wrote.
Most recently, at the start of this year, Murray blasted her Republican counterparts on the Senate HELP Committee for holding a sham hearing to discredit medication abortion.
Throughout her career, Murray has beat back countless Republican attacks on reproductive care and other family planning services—and she is widely credited with successfully pushing the Bush administration’s FDA to follow the science and make Plan B available over the counter.
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