Editorial Excerpts, September 2025
Published: September 8, 2025
As Missouri and many other states continue their fractious political battles over the issue of reproductive rights, a Trump administration project is threatening to undermine those rights nationally: The Food and Drug Administration is unilaterally launching a “safety review” of mifepristone, the widely used abortion-inducing medication, based on nothing but junk science conjured up by anti-choice activists.
The FDA review was confirmed at a Senate hearing last week by (it should come as no surprise) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the administration’s Health and Human Services Secretary and chief purveyor of anti-science nonsense. Kennedy justified the review by citing scientifically suspect, ideologically driven “research” that presumes to contradict decades of mainstream medical data.
The strategy here isn’t difficult to see: With voters in recent years protecting reproductive rights even in red states like Missouri, and with passage of a federal abortion ban remaining politically unlikely, the administration will attempt to use the medical safety issue to impede abortion access nationally — without a single vote by members of Congress or anyone else. If they’re successful, abortion services will become far more difficult to access even in states with laws fully protecting that right.
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Outlawing the drugs is a stated goal of Project 2025, the far-right governmental blueprint from the Heritage Foundation that President Donald Trump tried to disavow before embarking on a second term that has been defined by his attempts to implement it virtually point by point. …
– St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 21, 2025
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A study published in The Lancet predicted that Donald Trump’s aid cuts could claim more than 14 million lives by 2030, a third of them among children. For many poor countries, the scale of the shock would be similar to that of a major war, the authors found. More than four-fifths of the US agency’s programs have been cut, with surviving projects folded into the State Department.
The US was by far the world’s largest donor to global development — though its contributions were a fraction of the G7 target of 0.7% of GDP. Yet the damage does not end there. Its move encouraged others to follow suit. The UK, Germany, and France are slashing their aid budgets to spend more on defense. Oxfam says that the collective retrenchment by G7 nations is the biggest aid cut since 1960, with spending 26% lower in 2026 than it was last year. Don’t expect China or the Gulf states to fill this gaping hole.
It is not just grim news for aid recipients. It bodes ill for all. It would be naive to imagine that aid is a high‑mindedly altruistic endeavor. Just as conflict breeds hunger and poverty, so injustice and deprivation breed instability and a more dangerous world. Slashing health budgets also increases the risks of another global pandemic.
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For all their flaws, USAID-funded programs alone saved almost 92 million lives over 20 years. We know that remarkable leaps in human wellbeing are possible. …
– The Guardian, July 1, 2025