Anti-abortion conservatives lashed out at the Trump administration after the Food and Drug Administration said it will not immediately limit access to the abortion pill mifepristone while it continues a review of the drug.

In a five-page, court-ordered status update filed Wednesday night, the government’s lawyers said officials will keep collecting data on mifepristone through December, and they expect to interpret the results and draft a report by March. The filing says the agency will not decide whether to impose changes to its drug safety program for mifepristone — which the FDA currently allows to be dispensed in-person or by mail for use through 10 weeks’ gestation — until after those steps are completed.

The update, which came as part of a lawsuit the state of Louisiana brought against the FDA last year seeking to restrict access to the pill, angered anti-abortion conservatives who have been pushing for an end to the telehealth prescribing and mailing of the pills.

Lila Rose, president of the group Live Action, called the government’s timeline “UNACCEPTABLE,” adding, “The FDA must pull the abortion pill from the market NOW.”

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, called the update “alarming” and said the agency is “trying to peddle fool’s gold.”

Kristan Hawkins, president of the group Students for Life, accused the Trump administration of “refusing to talk until after the election.”

The condemnations were the latest example of frustrations from anti-abortion Republicans who believe the Trump administration has not done enough to restrict the availability of abortion pills in his second term.

More than 100 scientific studies have confirmed mifepristone is safe and effective when used in conjunction with misoprostol to end a pregnancy, including when the pills are prescribed virtually and mailed to patients. But anti-abortion Republicans have been pushing for the FDA to review its availability and restrict access as the pills have become more popular after the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade in June 2022. Medication abortions now account for the majority of abortions nationwide, and the use of abortion pills by mail has increased from accounting for 5% of all abortions in 2022 to more than a quarter in the first half of last year, according to data collected by the abortion rights advocacy group Society of Family Planning.

Democrats and reproductive rights advocates, meanwhile, argued the Trump administration’s newly unveiled timeline suggests they are trying to dodge taking a politically unpopular action before the midterms. Last week, The Washington Sun reported that White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and other top officials directed Attorney General Todd Blanche to avoid any abortion-related actions before the midterms, though the White House denied the report.

Nonetheless, the Democratic National Committee sent out a memo Thursday morning saying the Wednesday filing from the FDA proved that the government “is punting its full-scale attack on abortion” until after November.

Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said the administration “is delaying this report because attacks on medication abortion will backfire with voters, but extremists will try to ban abortion as soon as the election is over.”

The Wednesday filing also shed new light on how officials are conducting the review, a process that has otherwise been shrouded in secrecy. It states that officials are reviewing the use of mifepristone to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks’ gestation in 100,000 instances, in part by comparing it to surgical abortions during the same time frame and in the same number of women.

The filing states the safety analysis “will consist of measuring the frequency of a variety of safety outcomes and comparing the frequency of those outcomes between women who use mifepristone and the comparator group, adjusting for baseline differences in both groups of women.”

While the FDA review remains ongoing, other threats to abortion pills loom. Blanche told the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that DOJ officials would review an opinion issued by the Biden DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel that concluded the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, could not be invoked to ban the mailing of abortion pills, contrary to the wishes of abortion opponents.

Earlier this month, attorneys general from three Republican-led states filed a formal request with the Supreme Court to sue three Democrat-led states over their shield laws preventing abortion providers from extradition and prosecution in other states. The high court has what’s known as original jurisdiction when states sue one another, meaning those suits are filed directly with the Supreme Court as opposed to a lower court. But the justices are not obligated to rule in such cases and have rarely done so.

The same day, those states — Louisiana, Arkansas and Alabama — also filed a suit against more than 30 abortion pill providers in the Western District Court of Louisiana, alleging they are violating federal and state laws in operating under shield laws.

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