Trump’s bringing in the big guns:
As a journalist who covers reproductive rights, I’ve spent the first six months of Donald Trump’s second term waiting for the other shoe to drop on abortion. Sure, the president has pardoned nearly two dozen people who blockaded abortion clinics and signed a bill to kick Planned Parenthood out of Medicaid, but the administration has much more power to restrict abortion access than it’s wielded so far.
Trump’s picks for two relatively low-profile roles may signal where his administration is headed next: In recent months, he’s appointed a pair of anti-abortion zealots to work at the influential Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice. OLC provides legal advice to the president and the entire executive branch, meaning its responsibilities include drafting legal opinions for the attorney general, reviewing executive orders and presidential proclamations, and assessing the constitutionality of pending legislation.
In December 2022, shortly after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the OLC under President Joe Biden notably published an opinion that abortion opponents hate. OLC opinions are considered binding across administrations, and this one said that sending abortion medications through the mail and common carriers like FedEx does not violate an 1873 law known as the Comstock Act, as long as the sender doesn’t know that the drugs will be used illegally. The Comstock Act is an anti-vice and sexual morality statute that bans the mailing of abortifacients, among other “indecent” items. But it never targeted legal abortion, and, for nearly a century, courts have interpreted it to include a medical exception.
Anti-abortion activists, however, view Comstock as something of a skeleton key that could ban abortion pills and even prohibit all abortions nationwide. Project 2025, a conservative playbook spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, has called for the rescission of that Biden-era memo to once again permit Comstock prosecutions of what the right deems to be illegal abortions. Trump’s two recent OLC appointees are in a position where they’ll be able to do exactly that.
There’s more at the link, unfortunately. The hits just keep on coming.
There are so many atrocities happening all at once that it’s easy to lose track. But the war on women that’s going on all over the country is actually escalating. The Big Beautiful Boondoggle defunds Planned Parenthood and I think we can count on the throwbacks on the Supreme Court to uphold it. They’re the ones who unleashed this horror after all.
Jessica Valenti covers this story on her Substack called “Abortion Every Day” that’s well worth reading. It’s depressing but it does remind me that this issue is still very much relevant in the lives of countless thousands of women around the country. And if the Trump administration has its way, it’s going to get worse.