A new PBS series, inspired by Ms. reporting, explores how medications used in abortion and emergency contraception could transform women’s health and why patients are still waiting after decades of feminist advocacy.Demonstrators hold signs depicting RU 486, also known as mifepristone, outside Italy’s Ministry of Health in Rome on Sept. 28, 2026, the Global Day for Free, Safe and Guaranteed Abortion for All. (Simona Granati / Corbis via Getty Images)

Mifepristone is known as the abortion pill, but it has other uses most Americans have never heard about. For more than three decades, scientists have known this medication could do far more than end a pregnancy. Research shows mifepristone and a similar drug ulipristal acetate (sold under the brand name ella) can shrink fibroids, treat endometriosis and may treat and even prevent breast cancer.

Despite this huge potential to improve women’s health and well-being, abortion opponents have obstructed research into these treatments for decades, fearing anything that could make mifepristone more available would weaken their fight against abortion.

The burden of this obstruction has fallen on women, left to suffer from years of painful fibroids and endometriosis, heavy bleeding and reduced fertility, or death from aggressive forms of breast cancer, while research that could help sits on the shelf.

For years, the fight to unlock mifepristone’s lifesaving potential was a story only feminist media would tell, but mainstream media is finally catching up.

Inspired by a Winter 2026 Ms. magazine cover story on the potential of mifepristone, Sarah Varney of PBS NewsHour produced a two-part series, Beyond Abortion, on Sep. 21 and 22 on the use of mifepristone and ulipristal acetate to treat fibroids, endometriosis and breast cancer. (Part 1 here; part 2 here.)

For the series, Varney interviewed researchers from the U.S. and England, as well as women who have used these medications to treat these conditions.

… Abortion opponents have obstructed research into these treatments for decades, fearing anything that could make mifepristone more available would weaken their fight against abortion.

The first episode of Beyond Abortion focuses on how mifepristone and ulipristal can treat fibroids and endometriosis.

Fibroids are growths in or on the wall of the uterus that can cause extreme pain, heavy and prolonged bleeding and infertility. They affect 70 percent of white women and more than 80 percent of Black women by the age of 50. It takes on average three years to get treatments, which usually involves invasive procedures and surgeries such as hysterectomies, when the uterus is removed. Endometriosis is when tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside of the uterus.

Mifepristone and ulipristal acetate treat these conditions by blocking the body’s receptors for progesterone, which stimulates the growth of uterine fibroids and endometriosis. But women in the U.S. can’t get these medications for treatment of fibroids and endometriosis from American doctors. So some women are turning to telemedicine providers from abroad.

Dutch physician and researcher Dr. Rebecca Gomperts says restrictions on these medications “take away very valid treatment options for complaints and diseases that only women have, and thus it will increase disease burden. It will increase mortality among women, for sure. So it’s a very fundamental discrimination against women.”

Restrictions on these medications also make research difficult, said Dr. Abby Liberty, an OB-GYN and researcher at Oregon Health & Science University. “The United States will be left behind because of the red tape around these medicines and the way they have been politically framed so people are afraid of using them and studying them and that will hurt them. … Abortion stigma directly limits access to them and investment in them as a potential treatment option.”

The second episode of Beyond Abortion explores what may be the most striking possibility of all: Could a pill help stop breast cancer before it starts? Dr. Sasha Howell at the University of Manchester in England recently published a study finding that taking ulipristal acetate blocked the growth of breast cells that can turn into cancer. The drug functions by inhibiting the effects of progesterone, which causes cells in the breast to grow and divide. After just 12 weeks of treatment, Howell saw the number and activity of these cells drop. The treatment may one day help prevent triple-negative breast cancer, an aggressive form of the disease that is more common among younger women and Black women.

But in the U.S., this research is stymied, trapped between antiabortion influence on the Food and Drug Administration and fears of what the Trump administration might do next.

“Unfortunately, these drugs have gotten caught up in politics,” said Dr. Laura Esserman, a breast cancer surgeon at University of California, San Francisco. “Because of the pressure from this administration or from others, I think people are concerned that they will be punished for doing this work. There’s just a very hostile environment to doing research and pushing innovation. No one is going to invest in making these medicines available if they can’t get them approved.”

… Could a pill help stop breast cancer before it starts?

Blocked at Every Turn: The Feminist Right for Broader Access to Mifepristone

For more than three decades, feminists have fought to put mifepristone in the hands of researchers and the women who need it to treat these conditions. But antiabortion activists, determined to suppress abortion at any cost, have fought them every step of the way, with little regard for women’s suffering or the toll on their health, fertility or lives.

The story begins in 1980, when French pharmaceutical company, Roussel Uclaf, patented mifepristone, then known as RU 486. France approved it for use in abortion in 1988. Shortly after, the Bush administration imposed an import alert on the drug, banning it from entering the country.

Led by Eleanor Smeal of the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.), feminists mounted a campaign to overturn the import ban so politics would no longer stand between American scientists and the drug’s potential to treat a wide range of conditions.

FMF delegation visits Roussel Uclaf in Paris, France, in 1991 to deliver thousands of petitions asking the company to release RU-486 to the U.S. market. Those pictured from left to right include Dr. Catherine Euvrard (Roussel Uclaf), Dr. Myron Allukian (president, American Public Health Association), Dr. Judith Resnick, Peg Yorkin (FMF), Patricia Ireland (NOW), Dr. Eduoard Sakiz (Roussel Uclaf), Eleanor Smeal (FMF), Ariel Mouttet (Roussel Uclaf), Allan Rosenfield (dean, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health), Dr. Carl Djerrasi (Stanford University) and Dr. Diane Robins. (Jennifer Jackman)

The battle soon moved to Capitol Hill. On Nov. 19, 1990, Rep. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) held the first of three congressional hearings on RU 486. Scientists testified that the import alert was hindering research into the drug’s potential to treat Cushing’s syndrome, breast cancer and meningioma, a type of brain tumor. Wyden placed the blame squarely on the FDA, condemning its “arbitrary, political and unscientific RU 486 policies.”

At a second hearing in December of 1991, leading European researchers, clinicians and public policy experts testified about their experience with RU 486. Smeal warned that the import alert threatened America’s standing in the world: “If we permit these forces to stop the pursuit of knowledge, the United States will not be a first-rate country in terms of health care, scientific research, or human rights.”

The third hearing in 1992, put a human face on the ban. J. David Grow, a man with recurrent meningioma, testified as to his difficulties with obtaining RU 486 from the French drugmaker Roussel Uclaf to treat his condition. Actress Cybill Shephard testified, “RU 486 may be helpful in curing diseases such as brain tumors, breast cancer, Cushing’s Syndrome, glaucoma, endometriosis, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer and depression. But little testing is going on. What testing there is, is in Europe and Canada. Our brilliant scientists are being frustrated at every turn and forced to turn their scholarly attention elsewhere. Politics has no place in medicine.”

Rep. Wyden and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) introduced the RU 486 Regulatory Fairness Act to reverse the import alert, but the bill won only 70 votes in the House.

When the FDA finally approved mifepristone in 2000, antiabortion pressure influenced the agency to impose severe restrictions on the drug that made research difficult. Nevertheless, in the ensuing years, some American scientists and many researchers from around the world conducted studies showing mifepristone’s promise for treating a range of health conditions.

While the U.S. stalled, other countries moved women’s health forward. China approved mifepristone to treat fibroids in 2014, and India followed, giving women there a treatment option American women still don’t have.

Meanwhile, the drug remains restricted in the U.S. in ways that make research difficult, and the Trump administration’s threats to restrict it further have left scientists and investors wary of pursuing this work.

Despite decades of feminist resistance, the attacks on mifepristone are only intensifying. Republican senators led by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) are demanding that the FDA remove mifepristone from the market altogether. They are also pressing the Department of Justice to misuse the Comstock Act, a 19th century anti-vice law, to criminally prosecute anyone mailing mifepristone.

While politicians fight over a pill, American women continue to suffer and some die, from debilitating conditions it could help treat.

PBS’ coverage is a crucial step toward exposing this injustice to a wider public, but awareness alone won’t bring these treatments to American women.  It will take women organizing and demanding that the FDA lift its remaining restrictions on mifepristone and clear the way for research in the U.S.

Women have waited more than three decades. They shouldn’t have to wait any longer for these life-saving treatments.

Interviews from Beyond Abortion are posted at Sarah Varney’s podcast Body & State, as of Sept. 25.