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At the very end of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s Wednesday confirmation hearing, Texas Senator Ted Cruz got Blanche to commit to taking a step that could upend abortion access in all 50 states.

Cruz brought up the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents want to use to stop the mailing of abortion pills. He pressed Blanche to review Biden-era guidance that cleared shipments of medication abortion into states that ban abortion. Alarmingly, Blanche agreed.

The 19th-century law made it a federal crime to mail, possess, give away, or sell “obscene materials”—including items used for abortion. Parts of the law relating to birth control were repealed in 1971, but Comstock was never repealed in its entirety. When abortion providers started prescribing pills to patients in states where abortion was banned thanks to “shield” laws, anti-abortion activists argued that this was a violation of the Comstock Act. Project 2025 also called for criminal prosecutions of abortion pill providers under Comstock, though the document only references the law by statute number, not by name.

In response, a December 2022 opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said it was not illegal for the U.S. Postal Service and other carriers like FedEx and UPS to deliver abortion medications to states that ban abortion, and that Comstock did not apply unless the sender intended pills to be used unlawfully. That interpretation has reassured abortion providers that they can prescribe pills across state lines without fear of federal prosecution.

Cruz asked the nominee point blank to review the 2022 memo. Blanche said he would. “Office of Legal Counsel opinions may be reconsidered when the attorney general concludes they are inconsistent with the law,” Cruz said. “Will you commit to carefully reviewing that opinion to ensure that it faithfully reflects the actual statutory text [of the Comstock Act] that Congress enacted?” Blanche responded with an instant “yes.”

Notably, Donald Trump appointed two anti-abortion lawyers to the Office of Legal Counsel last summer: Elliot Gaiser, who in 2020 called abortion a “moral evil;” and Josh Craddock, a Comstock proponent who also believes that fertilized eggs are people under the Fourteenth Amendment.

Cruz also brought up Comstock in the context of a lawsuit that Louisiana filed against the Food and Drug Administration, which seeks to end telemedicine prescriptions of mifepristone, the first of two drugs in a typical medication abortion. “Without asking you to comment on........

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