The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced the creation of a new task force that will take steps to promote abortion all over the country and could even go as far as challenging certain state laws about abortion.
The new task force labeled the “Reproductive Rights Task Force,” will make use of manpower and resources from the DOJ in order to “protect access to reproductive health” in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in June.
“As Attorney General Garland has said, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is a devastating blow to reproductive freedom in the United States,” explained Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta. “The Court abandoned 50 years of precedent and took away the constitutional right to abortion, preventing women all over the country from being able to make critical decisions about our bodies, our health, and our futures.”
Gupta went on to state that this new initiative was just part of the agency’s commitment to “protecting” abortion.
A portion of this new task force will be tasked with looking into whether various local or state laws stand in conflict with any federal law. One of the issues that the DOJ stated that it would challenge would be if a state chose to penalize a woman who chooses to leave a state in which abortion is outlawed in order to have an abortion carried out in a state where it is legal.
The DOJ also stated it would issue challenges to any state who chooses to ban the abortion-inducing drug known as mifepristone, which the agency states would go against the Food and Drug Administration’s “expert judgement about its safety and efficacy.”
Many advocates for the pro-life cause state that, even ignoring the obvious danger to the unborn child, there could also be issues caused for the mother as a direct result of the drug.
“[Even] though mifepristone-induced abortions have been used in the United States for over 20 years, there have still been no randomized trials to systematically investigate the immediate, short-, mid-, and long-term risks. Indeed, what literature has been published has nearly always been funded and conducted by groups and organizations committed to expanding abortion access, often with a history of advocacy for population control,” explained an article that was written, back in December, by many different doctors for the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute.
As reported by those at the DOJ, a portion of the work from the task force will be “proactive” and involve working alongside “reproductive service providers,” which could include Planned Parenthood.
The department has also urged Congress to push through abortion legislation, a plan that President Joe Biden has also called for in addition to officially codifying Roe.