Todd Blanche as Trump’s new attorney general is a ‘red alert’ for abortion rights, groups warn

Reproductive health advocates fear newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche will usher in a new wave of restrictions on abortion — even in states where it is legal.

Blanche’s confirmation “is a red alert for reproductive rights,” according to Nancy Northup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “The Attorney General’s job is to fairly and faithfully enforce the law, but Blanche appears willing to contort it to score wins for political allies,” she said Saturday.

Blanche has “openly vowed to use that power to ban abortion,” Gowri Buddiga, interim managing director for the group Free & Just, said in a statement shared with The Independent Saturday.

“From promising to restrict access to medication abortion through the mail, to gutting protections for patients and providers, Blanche will roll back access to care everywhere even in states where abortion is currently protected,” Buddiga said.

Blanche, who was confirmed in the early morning hours on Saturday by a narrow 50-49 vote, alarmed abortion advocates after leaked audio captured Trump’s former criminal defense attorney vowing to make the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the right to an abortion “permanent in every single state.”

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said, according to Politico, which obtained the now-deleted clip.

“If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that,” he reportedly added. “They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs.”

The Independent has contacted the Department of Justice for comment.

The Justice Department previously told The Independent that the comments “need to be understood in their full context, which was with respect to mail order abortion drugs, not a broader expansion of federal control over states.”

Much to the chagrin of anti-abortion campaigners, abortions have actually increased since the constitutional right to abortion care was struck down at the Supreme Court, thanks to a mix of expanded telehealth access, Biden-era policies and blue state “shield laws” protecting physicians who provide abortion care.

While much of the attention in Blanche’s confirmation was directed at a now-abandoned $1.8 billion“slush fund” for the president’s political allies and a provision that shields the president from IRS investigations, Blanche’s appointment battle suggests the Trump administration could pursue more restrictions on abortion access.

Under questioning, he committed to reviewing the the Justice Department’s interpretation of the 1873 Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to send a variety of objects including “abortion-causing articles” via mail.

A 2022 Justice Department opinion held that the law doesn’t inherently bar sending abortion medication, given that “there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion.”

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump described regulation around mail-order abortion drugs as a state issue, rather than a federal one, adding that he wouldn’t use the 19th century law to crack down on abortion access.

“The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue,” he said in 2024.

Republicans in the Senate have also pushed the federal government to settle lawsuits around mifepristone, a widely used abortion drug.

During his confirmation hearing, Blanche pointed to the FDA’s ongoing review of mifepristone. In 2023, the Biden administration ended in-person dispensing requirements around the drug, prompting challenges in Republican states.

“We have to have studies that we can defend in court,” he told senators in July.

In May, the Supreme Court continued to block nationwide restrictions on mifepristone after a conservative appeals court cut off mail-order and telehealth access the drug, threatening access to millions of patients.

The president has vowed to be “the most pro-life and pro-family president in American history.”

In 2022, the Supreme Court, thanks to the conservative supermajority Trump helped appoint, overturned the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v Wade, which had established a constitutional right to an abortion.