The Department of Justice promises to work ‘collaboratively, creatively, and relentlessly’ to protect ‘protect reproductive rights, health, and justice.’
In a Monday press conference marking 50 years since Roe v. Wade, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who heads the Reproductive Rights Task Force, made clear that, under their leadership, the Department of Justice will do everything it can to continue protecting and promoting abortion. Even — especially? — when that means meddling with the abortion restrictions states are now fully empowered to determine for themselves.
It’s no secret that President Biden’s Department of Justice, in keeping with the Democratic Party’s fanaticism on this matter, disagrees with the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson. The day the Court overturned Roe and Casey, returning abortion policy to the states, AG Garland put out a statement claiming that the Court had “eliminated an established right that has been an essential component of women’s liberty for half a century — a right that has safeguarded women’s ability to participate fully and equally in society,” a “fundamental” right that it had “repeatedly recognized and reaffirmed.” But let’s remember that this “established, fundamental right” was the right to kill unborn humans; that the Court’s repeated recognitions and affirmations of it involved distortions and contortions to hold in place a ruling that even some honest abortion supporters admitted was fundamentally flawed; and that the continuation of the Roe/Casey abortion regime involved nationwide circumvention of the democratic process.
Garland’s statements would hardly be harmless if they remained merely rhetorical. Their pronouncement continues to remind us of the sacrosanct status abortion rights hold for the modern Left. As empty gestures, they might seem tolerable. Yet, in the months since Dobbs, Garland’s DOJ has made it clear that it will back up such rhetoric with action, blatantly employing the powerful machinery of the federal government to this horrendous end. The Department of Justice announced the creation of the Reproductive Rights Task Force less than a month after Dobbs, promising that it would “work with agencies across the federal government to support their work on issues relating to reproductive rights and access to reproductive healthcare.” The task force intends to “monitor and evaluate all state and local legislation and enforcement actions” that might threaten federal protections of “reproductive care” or federal employees who legally provide it, that affect the ability of women to get abortions where still legal, or that ban chemical-abortion drug mifepristone.
Monday’s press conference made clear how far the Garland DOJ will go in this regard. It is taking special care to ensure that Department of Defense employees, as well as those served by the Department of Veterans Affairs, can still procure abortions, and continues to defend mifepristone. Garland also cited the DOJ’s lawsuit, launched last August, against the State of Idaho for its abortion ban. The lawsuit is premised on what Dan McLaughlin has called “a novel and aggressive legal theory” that “distorts the truth” about Idaho’s law.
Garland has signaled that the DOJ remains willing to meddle in state policy when it believes it should. In addition to defending federal protections of abortion, the DOJ is “evaluating appropriate actions in response to” the laws passed since Dobbs, “including filing affirmative suits, filing statements of interest, and intervening in private litigation.”
Gupta has gone even further. Consider her congratulatory assessment of her task force’s “whole of department effort” thus far, in which she praised it for working “collaboratively, creatively, and relentlessly to use all our available tools to protect reproductive rights, health, and justice.” How “creative” the DOJ will get in trying to meddle unjustly with the decades-in-the-making victory for the pro-life cause remains to be seen. Those interested in protecting the lives of the unborn should remain vigilant — and should not let the DOJ’s interference intimidate them.