Ash Todd BlancheConfirmation hearings for US Attorney General conclude this week, anti-abortion Activists demand that he demonstrate his “care” for women by protecting them from abusive men, making it difficult for women to obtain abortion drugs.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America recently sent a letter pressuring Blanche to settle a lawsuit brought by Louisiana challenging federal policy that allows mifepristone to be distributed by mail. This time, the group is particularly focusing on horrific stories of men who secretly administered abortion pills to pregnant women or forced them to take the medication.
They specifically point to a recent case, a army captain in Washington state who secretly gave mifepristone to a young soldier with whom she was having an affair. He was charged with intentional termination of pregnancy, domestic violence, fraternization and conduct unbecoming an officer. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and dismissed from the army.
That is, the criminal behavior was identified as criminal. The man was prosecuted. The system didn’t shrug its shoulders and say, “Well, if only there was a law against secretly drugging pregnant women.”
Drugging anyone without their knowledge or consent is already illegal. Aggression is illegal. Poisoning is illegal. Reproductive coercion is abuse. We don’t need to restrict a safe medication to punish people who use it as a weapon. Mifepristone did not abuse these women. The people did it.
We know that the far right understands this concept because its members often enthusiastically explain that an inanimate object cannot be held responsible for a person’s misuse. Every time someone says, “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people,” after a mass shooting, an NRA lobbyist gets nervous.
But put an abortion drug in the hand of a violent man and suddenly the pill is the only one to blame?
That selective logic would be almost funny if men accused of drugging women didn’t appear in the news every day.
We just witnessed activist and survivor Gisèle Pelicot Forcing the world to confront what men did after her husband repeatedly drugged her and invited strangers to sexually assault her while she was unconscious. As a result, researchers are now expose international networks where men exchange instructions to drug and rape their wives and partners.
Let me be clear: I am in no way endorsing the right’s bad faith argument on guns. The facts make that comparison immediately collapse, because the main cause of death during pregnancy and the postpartum period is, in fact, a homicide, with firearms used in the vast majority of these murders.
And yet there is no comparable conservative campaign to restrict access to guns because abusive men use them to kill their partners. In perhaps the mother of all ironies, the Trump administration is pushing to weaken gun regulations and make it easier so that the favors are emailed directly to buyers without background checks.
Instead, anti-abortion activists are attacking a drug they still can’t prove is unsafe after two decades of trying. The safety of mifepristone has been established. studied repeatedly over more than 25 years of use, and serious complications remain extremely rare. Today, medical abortion represents almost two thirds of abortions performed by physicians in the United States.
Opponents cannot plausibly claim that the abortion ban has prevented people from getting abortions. That is why they now present domestic violence as a side effect of women’s access.
It’s an old trick. When men abuse or attack women, society responds by restricting them. Don’t wear that skirt. Don’t walk home alone. Don’t leave your drink unattended.
Now it’s: Don’t allow abortion pills to be mailed because a man could use them to commit a crime, as if abusive men were uncontrollable forces of nature. Since we apparently cannot expect men to refrain from drugging their partners, women must give up access to medication.
Anti-abortion activists aren’t the only ones with stories to share. Reproductive health and justice advocates have been collecting stories about abortion for years and, more recently, collecting hundreds of stories of people describing what abortion medications made them possible. “I was still emotionally and physically recovering from an ectopic pregnancy,” one person said. wrote. Other told us she was able to “finish graduate school and have two children when I was ready with my partner.” While managing the loss of one pregnancy, another saying the medication allowed him to “remove dead tissue from my body that could possibly cause sepsis.”
That’s what mifepristone makes possible: survival, recovery, future fertility, and the freedom to have children when the time is right. But these types of stories rarely receive the same political attention because they are not sensational. They represent the everyday decisions we have to make to build the life we want.
The fabricated horror stories are louder, but they do not point out the real danger: male violence.
Democratic senators were right to question Blanche, the acting attorney general, about the Justice Department’s treatment of Epstein survivors and whether she would restrict access to the abortion pill – and his answers offered zero confidence, suddenly stating that he is “forbidden”to meet with Epstein’s victims and bent about his promise to end abortion by mail.
And no conservative demanded that Blanche explain how her Justice Department would protect people from reproductive coercion and intimate partner violence. Or whether he would vigorously enforce laws against sexual assault, poisoning, stalking and domestic abuse. Or why the administration wants to make guns more available to dangerous men.
But his silence tells us a lot.
Punishing the abuser. Protect the survivor. And leave the damn pill alone.
Lizz Winstead is a comedian, activist, co-creator of “The Daily Show” and founder of Abortion Access Front.
