The Trump Administration Is About to Step Up Its War on Abortion Access
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/todd-blanche-abortion-dobbs.html
The Trump Administration Is About to Step Up Its War on Abortion Access
Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general is promising to take bodily autonomy from millions of women.
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There is much to be distracted by in American politics: contentious primary races, a war of choice in Iran, a congressman accused of abusing a sitting Republican senator’s daughter, and the general malaise that is life under a second Trump administration. So the average American voter might be forgiven for not maintaining a laser focus on the fragile state of abortion rights in America.
One group hasn’t lost focus on that issue, though: America’s anti-abortion movement, which seeks to fully criminalize abortion nationwide (and ideally worldwide). That movement has found a friend in acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose controversial confirmation now seems likely to advance, and who is already promising abortion opponents that he will deliver for them by ensuring that abortion is banned everywhere.
In a phone call with religious anti-abortion groups reported by Politico, Blanche assured them that he and the White House were working in concert to ensure “that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state.”
“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and and and it will be permanent,” Blanche said.
In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health to end the era of legal abortion in America, and to do what the anti-abortion movement had always claimed to want: to turn the question of abortion’s legality back to the states. That, of course, was a lie. From the day Dobbs was decided—and frankly from long before that—the anti-abortion movement was working to strip the right to choose from every woman, no matter where she lives, and no matter what voters want.
Now, they have another powerfully ally with Blanche on board.
It’s a major development. Attempts to ban abortion nationwide are broadly unpopular, which is part of why Trump sidestepped the issue on the campaign trail and essentially said he wants to leave these decisions to the states. Abortion simply doesn’t rank as highly on the list of the president’s concerns as, say, immigration, or building a massive arch to honor himself. That’s partly a good thing—it means that this administration has not made totally bulldozing abortion rights a top priority. But it has also meant that random abortion opponents within the administration, or administration members who feel beholden to the powerful anti-abortion movement, can exercise extraordinary power and the president doesn’t really pay attention. In a political news ecosystem where Trump is at the center of everything, his lack of personal emphasis on abortion means the press isn’t giving the issue top billing either.
As acting attorney general, Blanche already has the power to further restrict access to abortion in an era where it’s in decline. That power will only be augmented when he sheds the “acting” label, and Blanche’s latest promises to the anti-abortion movement suggest he’s ready to use it.
As it stands, abortion is banned across most of the South and Midwest. Women in those states either have to travel out of state for the procedure or procure abortion-inducing pills from doctors in states where abortion is legal. The anti-abortion movement and their allies in the Trump administration see that as a loophole. The Trump Food and Drug Administration is reviewing the safety and by extension legality of mifepristone, which in the U.S. is typically used with misoprostol to induce abortions (this two-pill combo is typically referred to as “the abortion pill,” although misoprostol can still be used alone). Mifepristone has been on the market for decades and has an exemplary safety record; this review is entirely motivated by anti-abortion politics. Because misoprostol can be used on its own to induce abortion, the mifepristone review is a threat to abortion rights (not to mention the trustworthiness and reputation of the FDA), but is unlikely to bring about the end of mail-order abortion pills. Which is why the anti-abortion movement wants the Trump administration to revive the Comstock Act, an 1870 law named after anti-obscenity, anti-masturbation, and anti-feminist crusader Anthony Comstock, to ban everything from contraception to dirty magazines.
A law criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills would be a major blow to abortion access and to women’s health and survival. These pills are often used as life-saving medications to help women with incomplete miscarriages and postpartum bleeding; making it illegal to mail them could create all sorts of shortages and bottlenecks that could leave women in dire circumstances.
The anti-abortion movement, no doubt, will deny that banning the mailing of abortion-inducing drugs would have effects on women who are miscarrying or bleeding. But the anti-abortion movement also continues to insist that abortion bans don’t hurt or kill women—despite a growing list of pregnant women who have died preventable deaths in “pro-life” states after not getting the care they would have received in states where abortion is legal. There’s an even longer list of women in “pro-life” states who nearly died, or lost their reproductive capacities, or wound up in the ICU, or went septic. The “pro-life” movement’s answer to claims that their bans are hurting women has been to refuse to investigate whether their bans are harming women.
This isn’t the only area where the anti-abortion movement is revealing that it has been lying for decades. Before Dobbs, the abortion opponents swore up and down that they would never criminalize women who had abortions—only doctors would go to jail. Now that they’ve successfully outlawed abortion in vast swaths of the country, that tune is changing.
Take John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life and the man who is widely credited with his state’s strict abortion bans. Before Dobbs, he was clear that “women need to be treated differently than abortionists,” as well as that “women cannot be the defendants” in either criminal or civil abortion cases. By this summer, he was saying something very different. “In the last four years, our attitude has lightened a little bit because we are looking at the scope of the problem,” Seago told Caroline Kitchener of the New York Times. “I want for it not to be taboo to ask, ‘What is the accountability for these women?’ ”
Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins once wrote that “we state again emphatically that we oppose prosecuting women for abortion.” She is also reconsidering in light of her movement’s successes, seeing prosecuting and jailing women for abortion as an option once the public is more receptive. “My message is ‘Not now,’ but I’m not saying ‘Not ever,’ ” she said. “You have to make abortion unthinkable before you get to that point when you ask, ‘How are you going to prosecute?’ ”
Seago and Hawkins are leaders in an already radical movement that is getting even more so. In Todd Blanche, they seem to have found a man who agrees that when it comes to forcing women to stay pregnant whether they like it or not, it is he, not women themselves, who should decide.
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