(Oregon Right to Life) — U.S. President Donald Trump today nominated a pro-life physician to head the U.S. Department of Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The nomination comes as the FDA is currently conducting a much-anticipated safety review of the abortion drug mifepristone.
Trump announced he was nominating Dr. Heidi Overton, who has served as the deputy director for the White House Domestic Policy Council under the Trump administration since last year, in a Wednesday post on Truth Social.
“Today I am honored to nominate the wonderful Dr. Heidi Overton, MD, PhD, as our next FDA Commissioner,” Trump wrote. “Dr. Heidi has been a ROCKSTAR in my Administration, where she has worked directly with Secretary Kennedy, Dr. Oz, and team, to deliver on the MOST TRANSFORMATIVE Health Agenda in History. She is known to take on the HARDEST issues, and bring me solutions that work best for the Country.”
If appointed, Dr. Overton will replace Dr. Marty Makary, who stepped down as FDA Commissioner in May.
Board-certified in public health and general preventive medicine with a doctorate in clinical investigation from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Overton is an outspoken pro-life advocate.
In a February 2023 policy brief, Dr. Overton argued that “abortion is corrosive to children, women, and society broadly because it devalues and extinguishes innocent human life.” She expressed disappointment that “federal policymakers have recently expanded access to abortion pills, also called chemical abortions, which are far more dangerous to women, enabling rapid access to abortion.”
RELATED: U.S. Supreme Court Issues Order Allowing Ongoing Mail-Order Abortion
In the policy brief, Overton urged “[A]ll administrative and legal proceedings on teleabortion [to] be monitored,” calling for the “immediately halting the effort to normalize abortion-on-demand,” as well as increased recognition of “the evidence of the risk posed to women.”
Specifically, she pressed lawmakers to “prioritize providing greater protection for the two lives involved—the mother and the baby—especially with safeguards to protect women and children from the dangers of teleabortion.”
Dr. Overton’s pro-life bona fides make her a welcome choice to lead the FDA as the organization reportedly nears its conclusion of its safety review of the abortion pill mifepristone.
“Dr. Overton is the right candidate,” John Mize, CEO of Americans United for Life, said in a statement to LifeNews. “She has the scientific and medical background that will enable her to perform an objective analysis of the dangers chemical abortion poses to women.”
The current FDA review of mifepristone was triggered by an Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) study that found a more than one in ten rate of adverse events connected with the abortion pill, twenty-two times the rate currently listed on the official FDA label.
RELATED: FDA’s Mifepristone Safety Review Could Be Completed by September
Pro-life leaders have urged the FDA to bring back meaningful restrictions on mifepristone’s prescription and distribution (particularly reversing its permission for the online prescription and mail-order distribution of the drug), or even revoke its approval of mifepristone altogether.
As Oregon Right to Life News has previously noted, federal regulations and safeguards on abortion drugs have been severely eroded over the past decade. In 2016, the FDA expanded the timeframe in which mifepristone could be prescribed during pregnancy and removed the requirement to report known complications that do not result in death. In 2021 and 2023, the FDA revised the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) for mifepristone, permitting the online prescription of the drug and its distribution through the mail. Local pharmacies were then authorized to dispense the drug, and that permission was extended to retail pharmacies, including Walgreens and CVS.
In addition to their intended lethality for the unborn, the ready availability of abortion drugs – thanks in large part to the rollback of federal regulations – poses serious risks of adverse events and undercuts state laws intended to protect unborn lives.
Without a required ultrasound, women and girls may be incorrectly prescribed abortion pills even if they have a later or ectopic pregnancy, placing them at risk of serious side effects and even death. Online prescription and distribution through the mail also increase the potential for bad actors to obtain the pills to effectuate forced abortions. Moreover, mail-order abortion circumvents state laws that ban or limit abortion, conflicting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson that returned the “right to regulate abortion” to the people through their elected representatives.
Dr. Overton must receive Senate confirmation to become the next FDA Commissioner. Kyle Diamantas, J.D. is the current Acting Commissioner.
