Vice President Kamala Harris will use her short appearance in Atlanta Friday afternoon to falsely blame Georgia’s lifesaving pro-life law for the deaths of at least two women. The untimely passings of Amber Thurman, Candi Miller, and their babies, however, had nothing to do with the Peach State’s protections and everything to do with Democrats and corporate media’s dangerous abortion rhetoric.
Shortly after the articles’ publication, Harris posted a four-part statement to X falsely claiming, “Trump Abortion Bans prevent doctors from providing basic medical care.”
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” she wrote. “Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
States that limit when life in the womb can be ended do not criminalize treatments for spontaneous loss or complications like those experienced by Thurman and Miller. In fact, every single pro-life law — including the one in Georgia — contains carveouts for abortion procedures like dilation and curettage when they are deemed necessary to save the life of the woman.
Yet, Democrats, with the help of their media allies like ProPublica, routinely assert that doctors are no longer permitted to treat complications, ectopic pregnancies, or miscarriages.
As SBA Pro-Life America’s State Policy Director Katie Danielnoted in a press conference Friday before Harris’ speech, the exceptions built into red-state legislation limiting abortion “rarely changed from the laws pre-Dobbs to the laws post-Dobbs.”
“The test used — reasonable medical judgment in most states, good faith judgment in others — is the test that was used before and is the test that’s used in many others,” she said, noting that physicians had no problems interpreting those exceptions for years, but “somehow, mysteriously two years ago, they stopped being familiar with that test.”
Harris, like many Democrats in recent years, has made abortion a hallmark of her 2024 campaign. She’s tried multiple times on her short time on the campaign trail to claim that Trump has deceived voters by, as ABC News put it, “flip-flopping” on signing federal abortion limits into law, even though the Republican’s 2024 abortion platform explicitly states decisions about ending life in the womb should be left “up to the states.”
It’s Harris’ extremism disguised as ambiguity, however, that is deceiving voters, who are more pro-life than politicians and the media credit them for. She’s refused numerous times to say whether she supports abortion through all nine months of pregnancy and lied about the prevalence of late-term abortions. Harris has long lamented life-saving laws and even co-sponsored the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which seeks to codify abortion through birth. She’s even called the pills that caused Thurman and Miller’s deaths “safe and effective.”
Harris’ radical abortion rhetoric is tricking women everywhere into believing pro-lifers are gatekeeping maternal care. Because of her lies, women like Thurman and Miller believe the abortion pills made even more readily available to them under the Biden administration’s expansions will do them no harm. In reality, the pills can cost them their lives.
Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.
Below is my column in the Hill on the return of the Comstock Act to the national debate. The controversial law came up in oral arguments over the access to the abortion pill in the Supreme Court. The history of the Act, and its namesake, remains a blot on our legal system. The repeal of the Comstock Act is long overdue.
Here is the column:
For the free speech community, the recent oral arguments over the expanded access to the abortion pill, mifepristone, contained a chilling jump-scare as two justices raised the applicability of the Comstock Act. That 151-year-old law banned the mailing of materials that were deemed “obscene, lewd, [or] lascivious.” The ban included everything ranging from contraception to pornography. It remains one of the most glaring attacks on free speech principles in our federal code.
The relevance of the Comstock Act to the issue of the availability of mifepristone is highly contested and unlikely to draw a majority on the Court. Indeed, while this same argument has been embraced by lower court judges, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito appear to be outliers on the Supreme Court in raising its possible relevance in this case.
For some of us, this is a painful reminder that the law continues to linger on our books. In my forthcoming book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I criticize the Comstock Act and call for Congress to repeal it as a protection of free speech. It still reflects the intolerance and arbitrariness of its namesake, the poisonous figure Anthony Comstock.
For the free speech community, naming a law after Comstock is akin to naming a law on business ethics after Bernie Madoff. Comstock personified the hate and intolerance that sustains censorship systems. He was born to a large, religious Calvinist farming family in New Canaan, Conn. Even in that deeply religious community, he was viewed as especially rigid in his moral views. During the Civil War, when most people were dealing with the horrors of mass casualties, Comstock was denouncing other soldiers for their use of profanity. Comstock was so widely disliked that, when a reporter once asked an assistant whether he had been punched in the face that morning, the assistant responded, “Probably.”
As the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock set about his work of “saving the young from contamination” and “Devil traps.” His view of obscenity stretched from lascivious lifestyles to feminism to contraception. He campaigned against women who challenged social and business barriers. For example, he was unrelenting in his efforts to imprison Victoria Claflin Woodhull and her sister Tennessee “Tennie” Claflin. The two women had committed the offenses of not only setting up their own brokerage house in New York, but also publishing a newspaper openly discussing sexual freedoms.
Comstock was able to secure the appointment as a mail inspector and promised to use the position to perform a needed “weeding in God’s garden.” He ramped up his campaign against blasphemy and the writings of “infidels” and “free lusters.”
In the case of Woodhull and Claflin, Comstock pushed to have them arrested over the publication of their newspaper. After they defied him and continued to publish, he went to Connecticut to mail copies of the paper to an alias. He then used the mailing to have the sisters re-arrested for a federal misdemeanor for the interstate mailing. When supporters bailed them out, he had them arrested again.
Despite his lack of success, Comstock was able to get members of Congress to pass the Comstock Act. Always eager to prove their own virtue, members codified his agenda against “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material. There he remains, lurking in codified form within our federal code. The act survives for the same reason it was first enacted: Members fear the stigma of rescinding a law purportedly barring obscene material.
It does not matter that we have ample laws criminalizing the transmission of material such as child pornography. Moreover, the Justice Department has maintained in an internal memo that the law should only be enforced where prosecutors can establish intent by the sender that the material will be used for unlawful purposes. Medically harmful or threatening material can also be subject to criminal or civil actions under other laws.
The applicability of this law to “lewd and lascivious” speech would likely be struck down, but it remains on the books as a statutory affront to our free speech values. Some Democratic members, such as Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), have called for the Comstock Act to be rescinded.
For the free speech community, these members are uncertain champions in any fight against censorship. Democrats in Congress have overwhelmingly supported censorship and blacklisting of those deemed spreaders of disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. Some of these members are now using McCarthyist attacks against those who criticize the president or testify for free speech. However, the free speech community is used to fleeting allies that rise and recede with the politics of the moment.
The Comstock Act is a relic from one of the most anti-free speech periods in our history. Countless citizens were abused under Comstock and his later-eponymous law. They are the victims of those who professed to “weed God’s garden” to rid our nation of “infidels” and “free lusters.”
The repeal of the Comstock Act will not materially change the case over the abortion pill or other related cases. It would, however, bring closure to a disgraceful period of history where social and political dissenters were isolated, ostracized, or imprisoned for their views. Ultimately, the most indecent thing revealed by Congress in passing the Comstock Act was the act itself.
The question is whether our current leaders have the courage to stand with liberty over zealotry and repeal the Comstock Act.
Jonathan Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at the George Washington University Law School.
In his 67-page straight-talking opinion, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
“Unborn humans.” “Eugenics.” “Head, hands, and legs, with defined fingers and toes.” “Shame, regret, anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts.”
Federal Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s Friday decision freezing the FDA’s approval of the abortion-pill combination, mifepristone and misoprostol, included these phrases and more. And while the left is already attacking Kacsmaryk’s 67-page straight-talking opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA by framing it as filled with anti-abortionrhetoric, the Trump appointee stuck to the facts — something Americans desperately need to hear after decades of euphemistic discussions about abortion.
After a brief introduction in which Kacsmaryk highlighted the FDA’s two decades of stonewalling that delayed a legal challenge to the 2000 approval of the abortion drugs, the court opened with the basic facts. The plaintiffs — doctors and medical associations that provide health care to pregnant and post-abortive women and girls — sued the FDA, challenging several administrative actions related to the approval of the chemical abortion drugs.
‘Unborn Humans’
The court then explained the drugs and their functioning: “Mifepristone — also known as RU-486 or Mifeprex — is a synthetic steroid that blocks the hormone progesterone, halts nutrition, and ultimately starves the unborn human until death.” But “because mifepristone alone will not always complete the abortion,” the court continued, “the FDA mandates a two-step drug regimen: mifepristone to kill the unborn human, followed by misoprostol to induce cramping and contractions to expel the unborn human from the mother’s womb.”
Calling an unborn human an “unborn human” immediately triggered abortion activists, but as Kacsmaryk explained in a footnote, such terminology is scientifically correct, whereas the lawyers and courts “often use the word ‘fetus’ to inaccurately identify unborn humans in unscientific ways.”
“The word ‘fetus,’” Kacsmaryk explained, “refers to a specific gestational stage of development, as opposed to the zygote, blastocyst, or embryo stages.” And because the FDA’s approval of the abortion drugs applies at multiple “gestational stages,” the word “fetus” would be inaccurate.
It is understandable that abortion activists want to hide the humanity of unborn humans, but that doesn’t make the science less real: It just means girls and women who have bought the “clump of cells” narrative will suffer when faced with the truth, which chemical “at home abortions” force.
“The mother seeing the aborted human ‘appears to be a difficult aspect of the medical termination process which can be distressing, bring home the reality of the event and may influence later emotional adaptation,’” the court wrote, based on the record evidence. “For example, one woman was surprised and saddened to see that her aborted baby ‘had a head, hands, and legs’ with ‘[d]efined fingers and toes.’”
Another woman alleged that “she did not receive an ultrasound or any other physical examination before receiving chemical abortion drugs from Planned Parenthood.” According to the record, “The abortionist misdated the baby’s gestational age as six weeks, resulting in the at-home delivery of a ‘lifeless, fully formed baby in the toilet,’ later determined to be around 30-36 weeks old.”
Harm to Women
Beyond exposing the reality that abortion kills an unborn human, Kacsmaryk’s opinion also refuted the “popular belief and talking points” that using the abortion pill is “as easy as taking Advil.” Here, the federal judge detailed the factual evidence. Among other things, “bleeding from a chemical abortion, unlike surgical abortion, can last up to several weeks,” and by being done at home, “without physician oversight,” it can lead “to undetected ectopic pregnancies, failure of rH factor incompatibility detection, and misdiagnosis of gestational age — all leading to severe or even fatal consequences.”
The opinion also countered the claim that side effects are rare by highlighting evidence that “over sixty percent of women and girls’ emergency room visits after chemical abortions are miscoded as ‘miscarriages’ rather than adverse effects to mifepristone.”
The evidence also shows emotional and psychological injury, Kacsmaryk stressed, with 77 percent of women who underwent a chemical abortion reporting “a negative change” after the at-home abortion, and 38 percent of women reporting issues “with anxiety, depression, drug abuse, and suicidal thoughts because of the chemical abortion.”
While the abortion industry prefers to cite its own evidence, as Kacsmaryk noted, those studies are flawed both because of the miscoding of chemical abortions as miscarriages and because the FDA stopped requiring the reporting of non-fatal adverse reactions.
Eugenic Roots
The left also didn’t like Kacsmaryk exposing the eugenic beliefs of the Population Council, which had sought FDA approval for the abortion drugs. John D. Rockefeller founded the Population Council in 1952, “after he convened a conference with ‘population activists’ such as Planned Parenthood’s director and several well-known eugenicists,” the court wrote. Attendees of that conference discussed “the problem of ‘quality,’” and concluded that “[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.”
“[m]odern civilization had reduced the operation of natural selection by saving more ‘weak’ lives and enabling them to reproduce,” thereby resulting in “a downward trend in … genetic quality.” …….. “Natural Selection”????? Can you say, “disciples of Margarete Sanger”?
Many Americans remain oblivious to the historical backdrop eugenics played to the abortion movement, and activist groups prefer they remain in the dark. The sunlight Kacsmaryk shined upon that truth infuriates them.
Political Pressure
Judge Kacsmaryk also exposed the political pressure placed on the FDA to approve the abortion drug — something Americans are likely to appreciate more today in the aftermath of the FDA’s hasty approval of the Covid mRNA shots.
In the case of the abortion pill, the FDA took the unprecedented step of arranging a meeting between the French pharmaceutical company that owned the patent rights and the eventual drug sponsor, the Population Council. “The purpose of the FDA-organized meeting was ‘to facilitate an agreement between those parties to work together to test [mifepristone] and file a new drug application.’”
Evidence further shows the Department of Health and Human Services “initiated” another meeting to determine how the Clinton administration “might facilitate successful completion of the negotiations” between the French firm and the Population Council to ensure the group secure patent rights and eventual FDA approval.” In fact, Clinton’s HHS secretary “believed American pressure on the French firm was necessary.”
Then after the Population Council submitted a new drug application, the FDA proposed detailed restrictions to address safety concerns, including that the drug be administered by doctors “trained and authorized by law” to perform surgical abortions; trained in administering mifepristone and treating adverse events; and able to provide treatment at a medical facility that had the equipment necessary to perform surgical abortions, resuscitation procedures, and blood transfusion, within one hour’s drive. The FDA’s restrictions were leaked to the press, prompting a political firestorm.
So Much for Safety
The FDA later abandoned the above safety mandates and approved the drug for use to kill unborn humans aged seven-weeks gestation or younger. The FDA further required three “in-person office visits: the first to administer mifepristone, the second to administer misoprostol, and the third to assess any complications and ensure there were no fetal remains in the womb.” All adverse events were also required to be reported.
In 2002, the FDA removed even more of the safety restrictions, increasing the maximum gestational age from seven-weeks gestation to 10-weeks gestation, reducing the number of office visits from three to one, increasing the drug dosage, allowing non-doctors to prescribe and administer chemical abortions, and eliminating the requirement for non-fatal adverse reactions to be reported. Then in 2019, the FDA approved a generic version of the abortion pills, and on April 12, 2021, the FDA announced it would allow abortion pills to be dispensed through the mail.
“Whether FDA abandoned its proposed restrictions because of political pressure or not,” the court wrote, “one thing is clear: the lack of restrictions resulted in many deaths and many more severe or threatening adverse reactions.” But “due to FDA’s lax reporting requirements, the exact number is not ascertainable,” Kacsmaryk stressed.
Straight Facts
But it was not on politics that Kacsmaryk based his decision to freeze the FDA’s approval of the abortion pill. Rather, in his methodical opinion, the federal judge explained that the FDA lacked the authority to accelerate approval of the drug under what is called “Subpart H” of the FDA. That subpart only allows for accelerated approval of drugs that treat “serious or life-threatening illnesses” — something pregnancy is not.
Kacsmaryk also concluded the evidence the FDA supposedly relied upon to approve the abortion drugs failed to support the conclusion that they were “safe and effective under particular conditions of use.” And finally, Kacsmaryk held the FDA’s approval of mail distribution violated the 1873 Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to use the mail to deliver any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
The Biden administration has already filed a notice of appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, and in issuing his opinion in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, Kacsmaryk entered a temporary stay, which he or the court of appeals will likely make permanent pending resolution of the case. Thus, abortion pills will remain available for now.
How the Fifth Circuit and eventually the Supreme Court will rule remains to be seen, but what is clear now is the abortion-loving left is desperate to keep the truth about abortion from the public and is furious that Kacsmaryk dared to expose the reality: Abortion kills unborn humans.
Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.
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American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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