Fetal personhood may be the ultimate goal of the movement, but the agenda has not proved popular with voters. That’s why plans for a second Trump term’s abortion strategy will probably rely less on voters than on the idea of a muscular executive branch. A playbook for an incoming Republican president created by Project 2025, a well-coordinated effort supported by more than 90 conservative groups, includes attempting to strip access to mifepristone, a drug used in a majority of U.S. abortions.
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The availability of abortion pills has made the enforcement of state abortion bans difficult, as Americans can order pills online or travel out of state to get them. That’s why abortion opponents have been gunning for mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in a medication abortion, including in a 2022 lawsuit, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. Food and Drug Administration. That case, which could severely curb access to the drug nationwide, has now made its way to the Supreme Court, with a decision expected in June.
A second Trump administration could still try to eliminate access to the drug nationwide even if the court sides against the anti-abortion plaintiffs in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine. The road map created by Project 2025 calls on the F.D.A. to limit access to mifepristone and ultimately withdraw it from the market as a drug “proven to be dangerous to women and by definition fatally unsafe for unborn children.”
The scientists at the F.D.A. might not even need to be on board with this plan for it to work. The secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, a presidential appointee, can override the F.D.A.’s drug approval decisions — a fact that raised red flags at the height of the Covid pandemic. As the authors of Project 2025’s road map recognize, Republican control of Health and Human Services could mean the end of the most common abortion method in the United States in blue as well as red states.
Leading anti-abortion groups also have coalesced around plans to revive the 1873 Comstock Act; what remains of the broad and archaic law could, anti-abortion groups claim, punish anyone receiving or mailing any “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article” with up to five years in prison for a first offense. Abortion opponents have reimagined Comstock for a Trump Department of Justice as a way to effectively ban most abortions everywhere, pointing to language in the statute that makes it federal crime to mail or receive any item “designed, adapted or intended for producing abortion.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/29/opinion/biden-trump-abortion-election.html
