The commitment came during a two-day confirmation hearing after Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) pressed Blanche directly on the Comstock Act, an 1873 federal statute that makes it a crime to mail "every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion." Cruz asked whether Blanche would commit to carefully reviewing the December 2022 Office of Legal Counsel opinion that concluded the law does not reach abortion drugs unless the sender intends they be used unlawfully. Blanche answered, "Yes." Cruz pressed further, asking whether the department would evaluate every lawful means of faithfully enforcing the statute. Again Blanche said, "Yes."
Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) joined Cruz in pressing the nominee on the issue. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), whose wife Erin Hawley argued the Supreme Court case challenging the FDA's approval of mifepristone in 2024, also raised the matter during the hearing. If the Department of Justice under Blanche ultimately reverses the 2022 opinion, legal analysts say it could open the door to blocking mail-order abortion pill shipments nationwide, including from the "shield law" states that currently protect providers who mail the drug across state lines.
Blanche also told the committee, "President Trump is the most pro-life president in history," and said the current administration is not defending the prior administration's posture in ongoing litigation over the rule. His confirmation remains pending before the full Senate.
A Law About What Gets Sent, and Who Receives It
Set the politics of Washington aside for a moment and look at what is actually at stake in a hearing room full of lawyers arguing about a 153-year-old statute. A small package moves through the mail. Inside it is a pill. At the other end of that delivery is a child who cannot see the mail truck, cannot sign for the package, cannot object. The whole argument over the Comstock Act, dressed up as it is in the language of postal regulation and executive branch memoranda, is finally an argument about whether the law will look after the most defenseless human being in the whole transaction.
Scripture never treats the unborn as a matter of private opinion. The prophet Jeremiah heard the Lord say, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee" (Jeremiah 1:5). That is not sentiment. That is a claim about personhood, made before any senator ever drafted a bill and before any court ever weighed a statute. The child in the womb is known by God before he is known by anyone else on earth, and no committee hearing changes that fact.
My friend, there is a reason the book of Proverbs does not leave this matter to abstraction:
"If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain." (Proverbs 24:11)
That verse was not written about a postal statute. It was written for anyone who has the power to intervene on behalf of someone being led toward death and chooses instead to look away. Law cannot save a soul. No act of Congress, no opinion out of the Justice Department, no ruling from any bench has ever regenerated a single heart. Only the gospel does that. But law can still restrain evil, and a government that uses its authority to stand between a vulnerable child and the instrument of that child's death is doing something scripture recognizes as good.
The deeper reckoning, though, belongs to every one of us and it is not a legal question at all. Every person reading this has, at some point, forborne to deliver someone drawn toward death — a friend heading into ruin, a neighbor lost in despair, a soul without Christ walking calmly toward eternity without Him. The same conviction that presses on a nation regarding the unborn presses on a man or woman regarding the people around them. You cannot legislate a change of heart. You can only preach it, live it, and trust the One who formed every life in the womb to finish what He starts.
That is the whole hope of the gospel: not merely that the innocent be protected by better laws, though that matters and is worth contending for, but that the guilty — every one of us — can be forgiven and made new. The same God who knew Jeremiah before he was born sent His own Son to die for sinners who had wandered as far from Him as anyone ever could. That mercy is still being offered today, freely, to whoever will receive it.