While mifepristone definitely cuts down on the time and symptoms involved in a medication-induced abortion (keep reading for the full deets on that later), it’s not a necessary part of the equation—aka you *can* safely and successfully end a pregnancy just with misoprostol, the other drug in the two-step abortion pill process. Medication abortion is just the official name for abortion pills , which is actually a two-step process that includes taking two different medications: mifepristone and misoprostol. Abortion pills are the most common method of abortion in the United States—in 2023, 63 percent of all abortions were done this way, up from 53 percent in 2020, according to the reproductive health research and policy group Guttmacher Institute.