WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN) has introduced legislation to repeal a 151-year-old law prohibiting the distribution of abortion pills via the U.S. postal system, hoping to retroactively legitimize a controversial Biden administration executive action should the 2024 elections go in Democrats’ favor.

In January 2023, the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declared that a provision of the 1873 Comstock Act making it illegal for the United States Postal Service to deliver any “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion,” did not mean what it said.

According to OLC, abortion pills may be freely mailed, delivered, and received “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” And because “there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may use these drugs, including to produce an abortion, without violating state law,” the “mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the legality of the move (as well as to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s prior approval of abortion drugs) on the grounds that the plaintiffs supposedly lacked standing, leaving the door open for future challenges to possibly fare better.

To help prevent such an outcome, Smith introduced the Stop Comstock Act, which would formally repeal the 1873 law. Smith was formerly Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president of external affairs in Minnesota.

“The Comstock Act is a 150-year-old zombie law banning abortion that’s long been relegated to the dustbin of history,” Smith claimed in a press release, taking aim at “extremist Republicans and Trump judges” who support enforcing the act. She added that “a future Republican administration” could potentially use the law to restrict abortion even in pro-abortion states.  

“It’s quite astounding. Democrats in Congress must wake up every day wondering what else they can do to make it easier to end the lives of unborn children,” National Right to Life Committee president Carol Tobias responded to Catholic News Agency. “These are the same people trying to shut down pregnancy centers, trying to block pregnancy centers from online search engines, and vilifying the abortion pill reversal process. This latest effort is one more attempt not to help women and babies but instead an effort to make it easier to kill preborn babies.”

Easy access to and interstate distribution of abortion pills is one of the abortion lobby’s most potent tools for perpetuating abortion-on-demand post-Roe v. Wade, which they are aggressively pursuing regardless of the risks to the women they purport to serve.

A 2020 open letter from a coalition of pro-life groups to then-FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn noted that the FDA’s own adverse reporting system says the “abortion pill has resulted in over 4,000 reported adverse events since 2000, including 24 maternal deaths. Adverse events are notoriously underreported to the FDA, and as of 2016, the FDA only requires abortion pill manufacturers to report maternal deaths.”

Pro-lifers warn that with the Biden administration completely eliminating requirements that abortion pills be taken in the presence of a medical professional, meaning without any medical supervision or medical support close by, those events are certain to increase. 

“A November 2021 study by Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Health Services Research and Managerial Epidemiology,” writes Catholic University of America research associate Michael New. “They analyzed state Medicaid data of over 400,000 abortions from 17 states that fund elective abortions through their Medicaid programs. They found that the rate of abortion-pill-related emergency-room visits increased over 500 percent from 2002 through 2015. The rate of emergency-room visits for surgical abortions also increased during the same time period, but by a much smaller margin.’”

In November 2022, Operation Rescue reported that a net decrease of 36 abortion facilities in 2022 led to the lowest number in almost 50 years, yet the chemical abortion business “surged” with 64 percent of new facilities built last year specializing in dispensing mifepristone and misoprostol. Citing data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute, STAT says mifepristone “accounts for roughly half of all abortions in the U.S.” 

Smith’s bill stands no chance this year of passing Congress, which is currently narrowly split between a Democrat Senate and Republican House of Representatives. But it offers a preview of what could be in store if Democrats manage to keep the presidency, take over the House, and expand their Senate majority enough to change the filibuster rules preventing the chamber from passing ordinary legislation with a simple majority.