Behind closed doors, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche assured faith-based opponents of abortion that he would act forcefully to outlaw the purchase of abortion pills by mail.
The New Republic wrote:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went mask-off last week, promising behind closed doors to roll back abortion access even further, and telling religious pro-life hard-liners that he wanted the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the right to abortion to become “permanent in every single state.”
Blanche made the comments in a “prayer call” last Thursday hosted by the White House Faith Office and attended by various faith leaders. The call was not open to press and not on the record, although the entirety of the call is now up on YouTube.
“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said. “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that.”
“They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs,” Blanche added, singling out abortion pills.
This is a far cry from the answer he offered at his confirmation hearing, when he claimed he would “carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act,” the 150-year-old law that bans the mailing of contraceptives and other things considered to be “obscene.”
He also noted that the Trump administration is “putting practices and policies in place” to block abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from being sent to states that have banned abortion, a process that would require the Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act—something President Trump specifically said he wouldn’t do back in 2024 while campaigning.
“A vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote ‘so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,’” Senator Patty Murray wrote Tuesday on X. “Those were his own words to anti-abortion extremists. Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Will faith-based hucksterism save Todd Blanche? Can he go to the well of stopping abortion yet again? Or is that well dry?
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In last night’s election, Kansas and Missouri voted by huge margins to support access to abortion care. Women deserve to live through miscarriage and pregnancy!
In a similar vein, the retrograde men at the Heritage Foundation want to revamp Title IX, because playing competitive sports renders girls less feminine. Of course, they cloaked this idea initially by claiming to “protect” girls by banning trans kids from playing on girls teams. The ideology is peeking out from the curtain.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/07/heritage-foundation-womens-sports-title-ix-trans-athletes-discrimination-protections/
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Christine,
It was strange reading what Yenor wrote about women athletes. It reminded me of common fears in the early 20th century that too much study would harm women’s reproductive powers. Of course, statistics showed that women with the most education had fewer babies than women with the least education. The latter, presumably, were barefoot, pregnant, and happy.
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I became enamored of the suffragists and feminists in the early 1960’s when I was in the fifth grade, in particular Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony. Cady Stanton’s father was a lawyer and it was in his library that she learned about the laws which kept women from the protections of citizenship that were taken as their due by men. I remember asking my mother what was meant by the idea that women’s monthly “changes” made us unfit to govern ourselves. She struggled to explain, as we had never discussed menstruation. Finally, she just said, oh, that’s a bunch of nonsense.
The Heritage jamokes want to return to the 19th century.
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From wikipedia: Abortion in New Jersey is legal at all stages of pregnancy. Currently, there are no required waiting times, and parental consent is not required. The Center for Reproductive Rights labels New Jersey as one of the most abortion-protective states in the country.
I sincerely hope that the Trump maladministration cannot mess with NJ abortion laws as they now stand.
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Todd Blanche will try to reduce access to abortion in every state. Banning access to drugs-by-mail is a start.
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