Improper Government vs. Mifepristone

Back in 2023, I posted about the resurrection of the 1873 Comstock Act to ban distribution of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone through the mail.

I opined back then that the Democrats should have repealed that law while they had a decent chance to do so.

They haven't, and The Intercept notes the danger from that perspective that a second Trump presidency poses:

Because the Comstock Act is federal law and the U.S. Postal Service is part of the executive branch, Trump, if he won the upcoming election, could issue an executive order reviving Comstock as early as the first day of his second term. Separately, his attorney general could authorize going after pills in the mail.

Yeah, but hasn't Trump come out against a national ban? you might ask.

That may be the case, but even if he honors his word, he doesn't have to do anything for matters to become worse for women residing in states that ban abortion, according to the same piece in The Intercept.

Anti-abortionists in Mississippi have realized that they don't have to wait for the drug to be banned at the federal level or get official federal support from the Post Office to effectively ban the drug in states that have banned abortion: They can just abuse the fact that the FDA already doesn't authorize the import of foreign-made mifepristone (or misoprostol, which is often used with it).

The USPIS is the investigative arm of the nation’s Postal Service. The agency has known for at least the past decade, according to FOIA documents, that foreign-made abortion pills are entering the U.S. and being distributed in quantity without prescription. FDA regulations hold that this is illegal; the senders can be punished with criminal penalties.

Days after Roe was overturned in June 2022, the USPIS announced that it would not proactively pursue pill mailers, even in states where abortion was being banned.

“We enforce federal law,” USPIS spokesperson Michael Martel told me. “We have no interest in enforcing state laws.”

He said, however, that the USPIS does go after people who import nonapproved pharmaceuticals and those without medical credentials who mail prescription drugs. [links omitted, bold added]

Cue the drug-sniffing dogs whose handlers know what they're looking for and can cause them to alert even though they're trained against narcotics -- and who can then easily get the mail covers from the post office -- no warrant required! -- to go after the providers.

The old saw Controls breed controls is usually thought of in strictly "economic" terms, but freedom is of a piece, and that kind of thinking is dangerously naive.

Here, we see a best-of-breed-from-hell of the rules of an agency that shouldn't exist, an endeavor that the government shouldn't be engaged in at all, and an entire industry that can and should have been privatized decades ago. The bastard spawn of all of this enables superstitious busybodies to force women to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term, with all the risks that entails by itself, and face the agonizing choice of then giving up her own baby or caring for one when she probably isn't ready to.

The beauty of all of this for Donald Trump, who got the ball rolling and has emboldened the worst elements of the conservative movement, is that the antiabortionists can keep on making things worse, at least at the local level while he seemingly does nothing.

-- CAV