Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills
The Ohio senator and other GOP lawmakers conveyed their call for abortion restrictions to Attorney General Merrick Garland in a January 2023 letter.

By Dan Diamond and Meryl Kornfield
July 17, 2024 at 7:21 p.m. EDT

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), newly tapped as the GOP vice-presidential nominee, last year joined an effort to enforce the Comstock Act, the 151-year-old federal law that has become a lightning rod in the nation’s abortion debate. ... The Comstock Act, which bans the mailing of abortion-related materials, has not been invoked for that purpose in about a century. The Biden administration maintains that its provisions are outdated today. But some Republicans have attempted to resurrect the law to limit or effectively ban abortion nationwide, a position that Vance and other lawmakers conveyed to Attorney General Merrick Garland in a January 2023 letter.

“We demand that you act swiftly and in accordance with the law, shut down all mail-order abortion operations,” Vance and about 40 fellow Republican lawmakers wrote. The Republicans called on the Justice Department to potentially prosecute physicians, pharmacists and others “who break the Federal mail-order abortion laws,” citing additional federal laws that apply to criminal conspiracy and money laundering.

Vance did not respond Wednesday to a request for comment. The Ohio senator, whose staunch antiabortion stance has won him plaudits from conservatives and drawn sharp criticism from Democrats, has recently signaled he may be relaxing his position. Vance told NBC News this month that he supported access to abortion pills, citing the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that mifepristone — the drug used in most abortions — could remain on the market. ... GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, who announced Vance as his running mate Monday, has declined to comment on the Comstock Act.

{snip}

Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped organize Project 2025, praised Vance’s positions on abortion and said the letter aligns with their proposals. ... The letter “will likely be demagogued by the left to falsely claim it will lead to a national ban on access to chemical abortion pills,” Severino said. ... Supreme Court Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas also focused on Comstock during oral arguments in the challenge to mifepristone this year. ... “It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated obscure law,” Alito said in oral arguments in March, referring to Comstock as a “prominent provision.”

{snip}

Share
https://wapo.st/46dNxPR

By Dan Diamond
Dan Diamond is a national health reporter for The Washington Post. He joined The Post in 2021 after five years at Politico, where he won a George Polk award for investigating the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Twitter https://twitter.com/ddiamond

By Meryl Kornfield
Meryl Kornfield is a staff writer on the Politics desk of The Washington Post. Twitter https://twitter.com/merylkornfield

VoiceInTheDarkness 3 hours ago

The letter “will likely be demagogued by the left to falsely claim it will lead to a national ban on access to chemical abortion pills,” Severino said.

Heritage Foundation goober sayz wut??? What exactly does “demagoguing” a letter entail??? Who knows? But I do know that JD Vance and a bunch of other GQP congress members did indeed ask for an effective “ban on access to chemical abortion pills.” The fools don’t even care that the same medicine is used to help induction of labor as well as to treat incomplete miscarriages where some tissue remains, potentially causing bleeding and sepsis (and death, but who’s counting?): their ban will lead to more women needlessly being exposed to surgeries with more risks of complications than medication abortion pills would ever give them. The cruelty is the point.

Roger Severino
Vice President, Domestic Policy and The Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow

Roger Severino is Vice President of Domestic Policy and The Joseph C. and Elizabeth A. Anderlik Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. ... Severino is a national authority on civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, the administrative state, and information privacy, particularly as applied to health care law and policy. Find his tweets at @RogerSeverino_.

Severino spearheaded the HHS Accountability Project while a Senior Fellow at EPPC from 2021 – 2023. Previously, Severino was Director of HHS’ Office for Civil Rights, where he led a team of over 250 staff enforcing our nation’s civil rights, conscience and religious freedom, and health information privacy laws. He served from 2017 to 2021 and was the longest-serving OCR director of the past three decades.

{snip}

Severino holds a JD from Harvard Law School, a master’s degree in Public Policy, with highest distinction, from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s degree in Business from the University of Southern California. He was appointed by President Trump to the Administrative Conference of the United States and is a member of the District of Columbia and the Commonwealth of Virginia bars.

As OCR director, Severino founded the federal government’s first division dedicated exclusively to conscience and religious freedom compliance and enforcement. He enforced the Weldon Amendment for the first time against a state (California) after it coerced families and religious organizations into paying for abortion insurance coverage, leading to a $200 million federal funding disallowance. He also enforced laws protecting pro-life pregnancy resource centers from discrimination by states hostile to their message and enforced laws prohibiting forced participation in abortions by medical professionals.

{snip}

Fact-Checking 7 Claims by Defenders of Democrats’ Same-Sex Marriage Bill
Nov 21, 2022 9 min read

{snip}