Name: Exactly how Trump could ban abortion
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:19:40.000Z
Duration: 10 min 32 s
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These are the states in the U.S. that have now banned abortion completely.

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Along with the states that technically allow it but severely restrict it, it's about half the states.

But now there's a plan to use the federal government to ban abortion everywhere.

There are three branches of the United States government.

That ban could come in the form of a law passed by Congress.

But that's not necessarily where we should really be looking.

And only partly because huge majorities of Americans say Congress shouldn't pass a law banning abortion.

What really matters for the future of abortion rights in America is who the president is.

The duties of each branch are established in the Constitution.

One of the president's most important roles is overseeing hundreds of agencies within the federal government.

For example, the Food and Drug Administration, which is the agency that, back in the year 2000, approved an abortion pill, Mifepristone.

And in the 24 years since its introduction, medication has become the way that most abortions happen in the U.S.

That's why Republicans are laser focused on abortion pills and trying to eliminate access to abortion pills.

Today, about a third of medication abortions are done via telehealth, remote doctor visits, which the FDA has allowed consistently since 2021.

But that is a decision Republicans plan to reverse, requiring Mifepristone to be prescribed and picked up in person again.

They may even revoke approval of the drug entirely.

Would you direct your FDA, for example, to revoke access to Mifepristone?

Sure, you could do things that would supplement, absolutely.

That is not a very clear answer to that question, but it is also not a no.

Limiting Mifepristone would cut off a major way that some people who live in what we call banned states are getting abortions, although some are also doing that by visiting doctors outside of their state.

And the banned states really want to know who's doing that and who the doctors helping them are.

Banned states want the possibility of prosecuting people, abortion providers, abortion funds, organizations that help abortion seekers.

A Trump administration could help states get that information either by lifting the protections that keep doctors from sharing it or by using the Center for Disease Control to create detailed records on every pregnancy in the country.

All these plans are written down in a document called Mandate for Leadership.

You probably know it as Project 2025, a plan written by conservative analysts and former Trump administration officials for what they would do in a new Trump administration.

The document includes the word abortion just about 200 times, and we've only touched on a few of its plans to limit abortion access, but it actually contains one anti-abortion measure that dwarfs all the others.

If the other plans in Project 2025 are more piecemeal, just kind of chipping away at abortion access, this one would come the closest to an actual national abortion ban.

And it uses a powerful tool to make that happen, something that has just been kind of hiding in the law of the United States for 150 years.

No obscene publication or any article or thing intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion shall be carried in the mail.

It banned the mailing of three things, obscene publications, pornography, and then anything intended for either the prevention of conception or abortion.

In the 150 years after this law was passed, it was weakened by various court cases and used less and less, and Congress eventually repealed part of it entirely.

Wade brought this part back, and how or whether to enforce it is now up to the U.S.

Department of Justice, overseen by the president.

In December 2022, the Biden administration said that the revived Comstock Act does not prohibit the mailing or receipt by mail of mifepristone.

In other words, mailing abortion pills is still OK.

But a Trump administration would probably feel differently.

Not long after that, a group of Republican members of Congress wrote to the Biden administration, urging them to enforce the Comstock Act and stop the reckless distribution of abortion drugs by mail.

One of those members of Congress was Senator J.D.

Vance, who is now running to be Trump's vice president.

It's pretty straightforward to see how the revived Comstock Act could be interpreted to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills from providers to patients.

But if that's the case, there's no reason it wouldn't also prohibit the shipping of abortion pills from manufacturers to providers.

About two thirds of abortion are done with pills now, but about a third are done with instruments.

And mailing those instruments could be a violation of Comstock law if the Trump administration interprets Comstock as prohibiting the mailing of anything that could accomplish an abortion.

And that would shut down abortion nationwide in all states because every doctor orders things from out of state.

An administration enforcing the Comstock Act would probably target the two major manufacturers of mifepristone first.

And just going after a few doctors would probably be enough to create a chilling effect on all doctors providing abortions everywhere in the U.S.

It's kind of been Trump's game plan from the beginning to be confusing about what exactly he means on abortion.

Would you enforce the Comstock Act, which could prohibit the distribution of medication abortion by mail?

And then we will be discussing specifics of it.

But I don't know what generally no means or we'll discuss the specifics.

Does that mean you're going to prosecute some people, but not other people?

Does it mean you're going to prosecute people sometimes and not like he hasn't been as clear, I think, as is sometimes reported.

Look at what he's done rather than what he says he will do.

He says what he says to get elected to office.

We don't know what will happen with the Comstock Act.

If Democrats win control of the government, they could repeal it.

But after a really quick break, we're going to talk about one final part of the plan to ban abortion.

A longer play where the 2024 election is just step one.

If you like when we do this kind of video where we try to explain a dense, tricky topic, the best way you can support that is by becoming a Vox member.

Our website has member only benefits that give you greater access to our reporters.

And becoming a member will just help allow us to do this kind of original work reporting on challenging subjects.

You can support us at vox.com slash memberships.

This is the 2024 Republican Party platform.

It says, we stand for families and life and that the 14th Amendment guarantees no person can be denied life or liberty.

Anytime you see these phrases together, 14th Amendment and the repeated use of the word life, they are talking about an idea called fetal personhood.

Fetal personhood gives fetuses, embryos, fertilized eggs full constitutional rights under the 14th Amendment with the assumption that those rights would override the rights of pregnant people.

The anti-abortion movement has thought of fetal personhood as the kind of endgame since the 1960s.

To the extent that Comstock approximates a national ban, fetal personhood is pretty much a ban full stop.

You can't legally justify abortion if the law says that embryos are people. 19 of the states actually already have some form of personhood law on the books.

But on the national level, this is almost certainly not something Congress will be able to pass.

And it's not something the president can do either.

It will have to be done through the courts.

This is where the anti-abortion movement ultimately wants to go.

In 2019, an anti-abortion group filed a lawsuit in the state of Rhode Island asking the state's court to block Rhode Island's abortion rights law on the basis that human life commences at the instant of conception and that said human life is a person.

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Exactly how Trump could ban abortion

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