Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) called on Congress to ban the use of the mail-order drug mifepristone that causes hundreds of thousands of chemical abortions of unborn children and sends one of every 10 women who take it to the hospital emergency room with serious, potentially fatal medical complications.
“The abortion drug is not safe, it’s not safe for the babies it kills almost every single time and it’s not safe for the mother either because in more than one in 10 cases, the mother who takes that pill is sent to an emergency room with a life-threatening condition,” he declared during the opening night of Family Research Council Action’s Pray Vote Stand Summit (PVSS) on Thursday. “And the pharmaceutical companies who make that drug, they lie about it because they make money on abortions. The more abortions there are, the more money they make.”
“We have more abortions in this country now than we did when Roe v. Wade was the law of the land because of the abortion drug. It is turning every mailbox in America into a Planned Parenthood clinic. We cannot allow this to go on, we need to ban it,” he continued.
“Congress needs to ban the abortion drug in the United States of America. I have introduced legislation to do that, and I am challenging my Republican colleagues and everybody who is running for office, if you are pro-life, you cannot be for the abortion drug,” Hawley said. Hawley’s proposal is the Safeguarding Women from Chemical Abortion Act, which he introduced earlier this year in the Senate, and which presently has seven Senate co-sponsors.
Hawley was speaking on a panel Thursday evening shared with his wife, Erin, and moderated by FRC President Tony Perkins. More than 1,000 attendees from around the country and from Canada were at the Cornerstone Chapel Church in Leesburg, Virginia, for FRC’s 2026 edition of its Pray Vote Stand Summit (PVSS).
Besides Hawley, speakers for PVSS include former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson, former Congresswoman Michelle Bachman, who is now chairman of the FRC Board of Directors, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R), and many others.
Just before introducing the Hawleys for the panel, Perkins said in his welcoming remarks to the attendees that “what’s happened is this policy that was put in place by the Biden administration, it’s been kept in place by the Trump administration, it has allowed the abortion industry to adopt an Amazon business model, and mailboxes across America have been turned into the instruments of abortion.”
“As a result, we have more abortions today than we did before the overturn of Roe v. Wade [in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson U.S. Supreme Court decision], about a 21% increase in the number of abortions and about two-thirds of those are done with the abortion pill,” he continued.
“Even in pro-life states — many of you come from pro-life states, I’m from the pro-life state of Louisiana, it doesn’t matter — we now have more abortions in Louisiana than before Dobbs because of this abortion pill and it’s got to be stopped,” Perkins added.
Litigation is currently ongoing in multiple federal court districts regarding the status of mifepristone. Erin Hawley, who was a member of the Alliance Defending Faith (ADF) team that argued for the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court, as well as in the present proceedings, explained that mifepristone drug companies have standing in court for one reason: money.
Asked by Perkins if the drug companies are making money, Erin replied, “Absolutely, that was one of my favorite questions in the Fifth Circuit to Danco was, ‘Why are you here?’ and the answer is they have standing because they make less money if they sell less drugs that kill unborn children. That’s why they have standing.” Her reference to Danco was to the largest single pharmaceutical maker and seller of mifepristone in the United States.
Asked by Perkins “what kind of regulation is in place for these manufacturers of the abortion pill,” Senator Hawley responded, “None, I mean, get this: The primary maker of the abortion pill is a company called Danco that you will be shocked to learn I am sure was initially funded by George Soros. It’s also funded by a whole bunch of people with an entity called the Population Council. These are hard leftists who think that humans are ruining the planet, that the fewer children we have, the better — the human race essentially is a parasite on this planet.”
The senator continued, “Danco [Laboratories] is based in the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. Their entire board of directors is private. All of their paperwork, all of their financials, their books, they won’t release any of it. They are trying to avoid regulation. But, as Erin just said, they are making billions of dollars every year because they only make one product, the abortion drug. Their entire business, their entire industry, is based on killing American babies, and they don’t even want to be subject to regular Food and Drug Administration (FDA) oversight. This has got to change. We need to ban this drug.”
A spokesman for Danco Laboratories could not be reached for comment by press time.
Commenting on Perkins’s observation that “these are not just political issues, they are spiritual issues,” and how the Hawley’s Christian faith empowers them in the public policy arena, Erin described a quote from Rev. Billy Graham in which he said he prepared for a sermon, then spoke from the overflow of that preparation.
“I think that’s what we are all supposed to do, not that we do it perfectly at all but to be filled with the knowledge of who God is, His truth, and what He says. And then if you know those things, if you are invested, if you are abiding in that, then I think it’s easier to stand. And quite frankly, it’s easier to stand when you have someone standing alongside you,” she said, nodding toward her husband.
Senator Hawley quoted one of the Puritan divines at Oxford University during the early American colonial era. “John Owen, who said, ‘The Lord doesn’t give us callings in proportion to our ability, He gives us calling in proportion to His power.’ And I have found there are so many times in the Senate, particularly when we are talking about this issue, I have felt, ‘Man, I am just overwhelmed here beyond my ability. I don’t have the strength to do it, I don’t have the ability, I can’t make a difference.’ Then I feel very small.”
“But then I am reminded it is my job to be small and it’s His job to be big,” he added.
Senator Hawley concluded by noting that during the seven years he and Erin have been in the nation’s capital in the Senate and litigating in the court system, he thinks, “The more the Lord calls us to stand, the more that He calls us to rely on Him, I just want to echo what Erin said. To me, the greatest comfort is coming home every single night to a woman who loves the Lord, whose first priority is the Lord, raising our children in the fear of the Lord, and, as we keep our focus on the Lord, everything else takes its proper place.”
