Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) asked Blanche directly whether the Department would "carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act and other federal pro-life acts." Blanche answered yes. Later in the hearing, Senator Katie Britt (R-Alabama) raised a case involving a young woman coerced into taking abortion pills sent through the mail. Blanche called the practice "wrong" and said, "I very much commit our resources to stopping this."
The Comstock Act, an 1873 federal law, bars the mailing of items intended to produce an abortion. It has sat largely unenforced for decades, but has drawn fresh attention as some states have used shield laws to ship abortion-inducing drugs across state lines into states with stronger protections for the unborn. Blanche's answer marks a shift from President Trump's own August 2024 remarks to CBS News, in which he said he would not use the Comstock Act to restrict the mailing of abortion pills. Five Republican senators pressed Blanche on the administration's posture toward mail-order abortion drugs over the course of the hearing.
The episode Senator Britt described was not abstract. Somewhere behind that exchange stood a real young woman, a real pill mailed to a real address, a real child whose fate was decided by someone other than his mother. That is the plain, unglamorous shape most abortions take now — not a clinic with picket lines out front, but an envelope.
A Question Older Than the Mail
Long before there were pills or parcels, there was a question put to the people of God: what will you do when you see someone being dragged toward death? Solomon did not leave it open for debate.
"If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain;" (Proverbs 24:11)
The verse breaks off mid-sentence, the way a warning does when it expects you to already know the answer. You do know the answer. If you see a man being carried to slaughter and you say nothing, do nothing, spend nothing to stop it, you have not stayed neutral. You have chosen. The prophet lets the sentence hang there because the choice is supposed to feel that uncomfortable.
A confirmation hearing in a marble room is a strange place to hear an old commandment answered, but that is what happened this week. A man nominated to run the Department of Justice was asked, in effect, whether he would forbear or whether he would deliver. He said he would not forbear. Whatever comes of that promise in the months ahead — and promises made under oath in July are not always promises kept — the asking of the question mattered, and the answer given on the record mattered too.
Scripture never treats the child in the womb as a legal abstraction waiting on a court to decide its worth. The Psalmist wrote of a self already known, already covered, already real before anyone else had laid eyes on it.
"For thou hast possessed my reins: thou hast covered me in my mother's womb." (Psalm 139:13)
That is not sentiment. That is a claim about what a child is at every stage, mailed pill or not, six weeks along or sixteen. The law can only ever catch up to that truth; it cannot create it and cannot erase it.
None of this is a case against mercy for the mother under pressure — often she is the second victim in these stories, pressured by a boyfriend, a parent, a circumstance she did not choose. The gospel has room for her too, room for the woman who has already lost a child to abortion and carries that weight alone. The blood of Christ was not too thin to cover that. But mercy for the mother and protection for the child were never opposed to one another in scripture, and they are not opposed now. A government that takes seriously its charge to punish evildoers and protect the innocent, as Romans 13 describes it, has no higher use of its authority than standing between a child and the mail truck carrying his death sentence. That is not politics dressed up in religious language. That is Solomon's old warning, still waiting on an answer, still asking whether you will deliver or forbear.