(NewsGlobal.com)- Earlier this week, the Biden administration took steps to try to provide abortion protection throughout the country, just weeks after the Supreme Court removed the federal rights to abortion by overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice said they’d start a task force that may challenge certain abortion laws in some states, and would work to promote access to abortion throughout the U.S.
The task force is being called the Reproductive Rights Task Force. The DOJ will dedicate manpower and resources to the task force so it can “protect access to reproductive health.”
Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general, commented this week:
“As Attorney General [Merrick] Garland has said, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is a devastating blow to reproductive freedom in the United States. 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.”
The new task force, Gupta added, would be just one initiative that the DOJ was working on to meet its full commitment of “protecting” rights to abortion across the country.
One aspect of the DOJ’s task force will be to investigation whether any local and state laws violate federal law in any way. One particular issue that could come up in this regard is if a state decided to try to penalize a resident who leaves their state to get an abortion in another state that still allows the practice.
Another aspect the task force might target is any state that tried to ban mifepristone, which is a drug that induces abortion. The DOJ says any law that tried to do that would be in contrast with the Food and Drug Administration’s “expert judgment about its safety and efficacy.”
But, advocates on the pro-life spectrum said the drug presents dangers not just to the child who is unborn but also to the mothers who would take the drug.
In December, the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a pro-life outlet, published an article that was written by a few doctors. The article read, in part:
“[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.”
Garland has been an outspoken critic of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe from the moment the ruling was handed down. When the ruling was released to the public, the attorney general said:
“The Supreme Court has 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. And in renouncing this fundamental right, which it had repeatedly recognized and reaffirmed, the Court has upended the doctrine of stare decisis, a key pillar of the rule of law.”
