Last week, the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing for President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Dr. Heidi Overton.

During the hearing, Dr. Overton followed suit with many of Trump’s previous nominees for federal agencies—avoiding questions, obscuring her true intentions, and feigning ignorance of her own public record on a range of topics.

Her nomination comes at a fraught moment for the agency. The FDA is facing heavy criticism following a Cyclospora outbreak that sickened many and rattled the public. The prior commissioner abruptly resigned after only 13 months in the role. The agency has also wrestled with political pressure on everything from reproductive health to vaccinations to flavored e-cigarettes, imperiling its historic scientific neutrality and risking a descent into partisan miasma.

Dr. Overton remains dangerously out of step with the general public, medicine, and science on the subject of medication abortion with mifepristone and her record explicitly showcases that she will do everything in her power to ban medication abortion.

The FDA works best when publicly unnoticed, operating smoothly and uncontroversially in the background of our country, keeping us safe. It is vital to our economy as well as our health. Take, for example, my home state of Ohio. Healthcare is our largest employment sector, and nearly half of our land is farmland. As a maternal fetal medicine physician, the scope of my work is providing the best care to my patients and advising on the available options to receive comprehensive medical care.

Therefore, we need an FDA leader steeped in objective, scientific neutrality rather than the culture wars Americans are so tired of — and Dr. Overton is a far cry from what is needed in this moment.

This week marks 26 years since the FDA initially approved mifepristone as safe and effective. Since the Dobbs decision, mifepristone has emerged as a linchpin in the preservation of access to abortion care for millions of patients. It also rests atop an enormous bedrock of research and clinical trials expounding its safety and efficacy.

As of December 2025, medication abortion has accounted for 65% of all US abortions, and one in four clinician-provided abortions were delivered through telehealth. Mifepristone specifically is used to support patients with their reproductive care and is even recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists for miscarriage management.

The American Medical Association has stated that serious adverse events occur in fewer than one-third of one percent of patients who take mifepristone, and continuing a pregnancy carries roughly 14 times the risk of death than abortion related complications. Reimposing in-person requirements, the AMA warns, would eliminate access for rural, low-income, and underserved patients and........

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