WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley criticized Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary for his recent comments about the dangerous abortion pills.

Dr. Makary said he has “no plans to take action” on the abortion drugs during a discussion Thursday at the Semafor World Economic Summit.

However, Semafor reported that the FDA may still act.

“There is an ongoing set of data that is coming into the FDA on mifepristone,” he said. “So if the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise we’re not going to act on that data.”

“This is exceptionally disappointing to say the least. Not a good beginning at the FDA,” Sen. Hawley wrote in response on X.

This is exceptionally disappointing to say the least. Not a good beginning at the FDA https://t.co/3J5nxtUAXW

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) April 24, 2025

Other conservatives were also critical of Makary’s comments.

“The abortion pill is not safe for the mother, or the baby,” Daily Signal correspondent Elizabeth Mitchell wrote on X. “The ER visitation rate for abortion complications appears to have increased since the FDA removed guardrails on the pill.”

During his confirmation hearing last month, Makary pledged a review of abortion pills, vaccines, and food ingredients, as LifeSiteNews previously reported. The Johns Hopkins University surgeon and former editor-in-chief of MedPage Today drew interest from conservatives due to his criticism of lockdown policies during COVID.

As LifeSiteNews reported:

On the subject of abortion pills, which new Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says Trump has asked him to study the dangers of, Makary claimed he has “no preconceived plans” but to “take a solid, hard look at the data and to meet with the professional career scientists who have reviewed the data at the FDA, and to build an expert coalition to review the ongoing data which is required to be collected as a part of the REMS [Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy] program.”

Hawley voted to advance Makary’s nomination out of committee following the FDA’s decision to fire an attorney who had defended vaccine mandates and the Biden administration’s decision to loosen safety regulations around abortion pills.

President Joe Biden’s administration ignored longstanding federal law and allowed the pills to be mailed around the country. Furthermore, his administration removed the requirement a woman see a doctor before being given the drugs to kill her baby.

“I can’t understand why Marty Makary would want someone who used the government to IMPOSE vaccines on millions of Americans and served as a Biden abortion lawyer to be his chief counsel. It calls into question his judgment,” Hawley wrote on X March 12.

Soon after, the attorney, Hilary Perkins, resigned and Hawley voted to move Makary’s nomination out of committee. She would later say that she is pro-life and conservative but was just simply following orders to defend the widespread availability of the dangerous abortion drugs.

“I am a Christian who is both conservative and pro-life and who simply followed my oath as a Department of Justice career attorney. He should be fighting for me, not against me,” Perkins told the New York Times after resigning. She reportedly had defended restrictions on the drugs as well.

While the abortion drugs can never be truly safe, because they intend to kill an innocent preborn baby, they are also dangerous for women.

As previously reported by LifeSiteNews:

A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.

Statistical expert Michael New has also explained the harms of the abortion drugs to women.

“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” New, a Catholic University of America professor, wrote.

“They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs,” New wrote. “They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”

Yet, some states are considering letting the drugs continue to be freely distributed even if their access is limited at the federal level. Pending Illinois legislation would order the state to ignore the rule of law and allow the free distribution of drugs, as LifeSiteNews reported earlier this month.