Noah McDonald on The Federal Strategy: A De Facto National Ban
Noah McDonald
The Federal Strategy: A De Facto National Ban
Claims and stances
Transcript
- 0:00 The administration's agenda, heavily influenced by Project 2025 playbook, is to eliminate abortion access nationwide, based on the premise that abortion is not health care.
- 0:09 Rather than pursuing a politically difficult legislative ban, the strategy is to use executive and administrative power to achieve a de facto national ban.
- 0:16 The primary lines of attack are the central federal targeting medication abortion.
- 0:21 The central federal strategy is to ban and criminalize medication abortion, which is now accounts for nearly two thirds of all abortions in the U.S.
- 0:28 This is being pursued by pressuring the FDA to reverse its decades-old approval of MIFA prestatone, and most significantly by reviving the Comstock Act of 1873.
- 0:38 This 150-year-old anti-obscenity law could be reinterpreted by the Department of Justice to criminalize the mailing of abortion pills and any related materials.
- 0:46 Because nearly all medical supplies are sent through the mail at some point, this stealth ban could be used to not only halt medication abortion but procedural abortions as well, without passing a single new law.
- 0:56 Also, weaponizing conscience laws.
- 0:59 Project 2025 calls for a dramatic expansion of conscience laws, which would allow nearly any healthcare worker from surgeons to receptionists to deny care based on personal beliefs.
- 1:09 These laws would be also used as a cudgel to define deny federal funding to states that have moved to protect abortion access.