Democrats worried about what the Trump administration might do to curtail chemical abortions have filed a bill in Congress that would prevent the federal government from stopping the mailing of abortion pills.

The “Stop the Comstock Act” bill, filed Wednesday, would remove language in federal law that prohibits sending items that cause abortion through the mail. It is a re-file of a bill introduced in June 2024, which the Register reported on at the time.

U.S. Sen. Tina Smith, a Minnesota Democrat and one of the bill’s sponsors, said she expects the Trump administration to use the Comstock Act to stop access to abortion.

“With Donald Trump in the White House, the threat to women’s reproductive health and freedom is more urgent than ever,” Smith said in a written statement.

Republicans control both the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, and it seems unlikely the leadership will schedule a vote on it.

“The bill won’t go anywhere,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee.

“Democrats are hoping this bill will energize a demoralized base, but they are doing so at the cost of women. Mailing abortion pills without an in-person doctor’s appointment can lead to complications such as severe hemorrhaging and, sadly, the possibility that a woman could lose her life,” Tobias told the Register by text. “Democrats want to make abortion available anywhere, under any circumstances, and at any time in pregnancy, but it’s women and their unborn babies who will suffer.”

Most abortions in the United States now occur not by surgery but through pills. In 2023 about 63% of abortions in the country took place through abortion pills, according to a survey published in March 2024 by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion and tracks it.

Most chemical abortions in the United States use a two-pill regimen. The first, mifepristone, blocks the hormone progesterone, which is needed for a pregnancy to continue. The second is misoprostol, which the National Institutes of Health says “may be employed to induce labor following intrauterine fetal demise.”

Congress passed the Comstock Act in 1873. The federal statute, which is still on the books, prohibits “sending or receiving by mail … means for procuring abortion.” A related 1909 federal statute prohibits sending “any drug … designed … or intended for … producing abortion” by “common carrier.” 

Neither was enforced after 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared a federal right to abortion in Roe v. Wade.

The federal Food and Drug Administration began allowing abortion pills to be sent through the mail on a temporary basis in April 2021, not long after President Joe Biden took office. The agency made the approval permanent in December 2021.

But in June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion when it issued its Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

That led postal officials to ask the U.S. Department of Justice if abortion pills could still be sent through the mail.

The Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel said in December 2022 that mailing abortion pills does not violate federal law “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.”

Trump administration officials have not yet announced whether they intend to apply the Comstock Act to stop the mailing of abortion pills. They also haven’t announced how they plan to regulate abortion pills, which supporters say are safe for women who take them but opponents argue are dangerous.

Critics of abortion pills have criticized the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for loosening restrictions on them during the last several years and for not tracking certain types of adverse reactions unless they are deemed serious enough.

That question came up during the confirmation hearing of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“I think it’s immoral to have a policy where patients are not allowed to report adverse events, or doctors are discouraged from doing that,” Kennedy said during a U.S. Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 29. “President Trump has asked me to study the safety of mifepristone. He has not yet taken a stand on how to regulate it. Whatever he does, I will implement those policies. I will work with this committee to make those policies make sense.”

Last week, President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Marty Makary, declined to take a position on how the agency would deal with the primary abortion drug, mifepristone.

“I have no preconceived plans on mifepristone policy except to take a solid, hard look at the data and to meet with the professional career scientists who have reviewed the data at the FDA and to build an expert coalition to review the ongoing data, which is required to be collected as a part of the REMS program, the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy,” Makary said March 6 during a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP). “It is pursuant to the REMS, and so if we’re gonna collect data, I believe we should look at it.”

U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington state, later in the hearing said that what she called “medication abortion” has “been approved by the FDA for many, many decades based on mountains of high-quality evidence and expert scientific judgment,” and she tried to get Makary to make a commitment in favor of it.

He didn’t.

Makary, whose nomination was moved forward by the Senate’s HELP Committee on Thursday, said, “You have my commitment to come to follow the independent scientific review process at the FDA, which is a tried-and-true process and that has been around, and so that is my commitment to you, Senator.”