DOJ says USPS is allowed to continue delivering abortion pills, even in states with abortion bans

The Justice Department has decided that the U.S. Postal Service can continue delivering abortion medication, even in states with abortion bans.

The DOJ’s Office of the Legal Counsel wrote in an opinion that pills being sent through the mail is not in violation of the Comstock Act, which criminalized sending “obscene” material in the mail.

“We conclude that [the act] does not prohibit the mailing, or the delivery or receipt by mail, of mifepristone or misoprostol where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully,” said Christopher Schroder, the assistant attorney general for the OLC.

“Because there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion, 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,” Schroder said.

Abortions drugs were creatwd in the 1970s as an alternative to surgical forms of abortion. One such drug, mifepristone, was authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2000. The drug deprives the mother’s body of progesterone, which is a hormone needed for the fetus to survive.

Another drug, misoprostol, causes the uterus to contract and dilates the cervix, which will expel the embryo.

USPS said the opinion “confirms that the Comstock Act does not require the Postal Service to change our current practice, which has been to consider packages containing mifepristone and misoprostol to be mailable under federal law in the same manner as other prescription drugs.”