Senator J.D. Vance's nomination as GOP candidate for Vice President gives new saliency to the conservative cry to employ the Comstock Act to bar the mailing of abortion drugs. If the issue is competently presented the Dobbs majority is likely to be receptive. The Department of Justice opposes that demand.Three dozen Republican Senators and Members of Congress last year signed a letter demanding Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecute anyone who is a participant in the distribution by mail of mifepristone - the key drug in medication abortions. Prominent among them is Vance whose conversion to a conservative Catholicism he attributes in significant part to conservative Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal.
The GOP lawmakers 2023 letter to the Attorney General concluded with a renunciation of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel which opined that the drug mifestiprone can be legally used in many states and therefore is not unlawfully placed in the mails. The Republican Senators and M.C.'s concluded:
The OLC memo only serves to further the deeply troubling proliferation of illegal mail-order abortion drug trafficking operations that operate both openly and covertly and endanger the lives of pregnant moms and their preborn babies. The reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail or other carriers to pregnant mothers who have not been examined in-person by a physician is not only dangerous and unsafe, it is criminal. We demand that you act swiftly and in accordance with the law, shut down all mail-order abortion operations, and hold abortionists, pharmacists, international traffickers, and online purveyors, who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws, accountable. We also demand that, in light of these laws, you cease efforts to prevent States from regulating or prohibiting abortion drugs. Instead, we expect that you put the law and your obligation to enforce it above the abortion industry’s dangerous and deadly political agenda.
We look forward to your reply and demand that you promptly rescind the OLC memo.
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