Abortion foes eye Interpol’s global law enforcement network to target abortion pills

A key player in the anti-abortion movement is preparing to unveil a new strategy to curtail access to medication abortion now that Attorney General Todd Blanche has been sworn in to lead the Department of Justice. 

In a July 22 webinar on “Stopping Black Market Abortion Drugs” hosted by the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the nonprofit research arm of SBA Pro-Life America, scholar and attorney Mary Harned said she would use a forthcoming research paper to detail how the Justice Department could use an annual global law enforcement campaign known as Operation Pangea to disrupt the domestic distribution of mifepristone, one of two drugs most commonly used for medication abortions.

But outside experts cautioned that there is little indication Blanche could successfully curtail mifepristone availability by using Operation Pangea, which was established by Interpol in 2008 to coordinate law enforcement, customs and health regulators across some 90 countries in a global effort to seize counterfeit pharmaceuticals, medical devices and other health products sold online. 

The plan, more than anything, the experts said, indicates the degree to which abortion foes are feeling let down by President Donald Trump, who promised to be the “most pro-life president in history” but whose second administration has done little to deliver on that promise. 

A participant in the webinar shared a detailed accounting of its contents with The 19th, which is the first news organization to report on it. 

The Charlotte Lozier Institute did not respond to requests to comment on the webinar or weigh in on specific recommendations related to Operation Pangea and mifepristone.

Limiting the availability of mifepristone has been a top priority of abortion opponents since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the nearly 50-year federal right to abortion and sent the issue back to the states. There has since been an overall uptick in abortions even as states moved to enact abortion bans in part due to the widespread access to medication abortion. Using Operation Pangea to target mifepristone availability in the United States would be a new frontier in abortion regulation, and it comes at a time when the anti-abortion movement has grown publicly frustrated with Trump’s inaction. 

But the plan seems impractical, the experts said, given there are far more straightforward routes to block mifepristone access. The obstacle, so far, is that Trump’s administration has declined to prioritize the effort. 

“They’ve spent the past 21 months coming up with strategy over strategy over strategy for Trump to stop abortion, and he’s done none of them,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who supports abortion rights and tracks the anti-abortion movement. 

“There are far simpler things for the Trump administration to do if they want to stop abortion,” he added.

Cohen pointed out that Blanche, who was previously the president’s personal attorney defending him in a case regarding concealed payments Trump made to adult film star Stormy Daniels, has been the acting attorney general since Pam Bondi was fired in April, and he was the deputy attorney general before that. 

During the webinar, Harned said Blanche had already agreed to make restricting mifepristone a priority and that she was “very hopeful” that her plan would come to fruition. 

Harned said that Blanche could use Operation Pangea to make the case that mifepristone originating from overseas was making it impossible for U.S. consumers to differentiate between legitimate and illegitimate drugs and those being distributed legally versus illegally. She specifically cited India as one country feeding the U.S. supply chain of mifepristone. 

India’s pharmaceutical industry is among the largest in the world, and legitimate companies there manufacture nearly half of the generic drugs prescribed in the United States.

Harned did not detail how Operation Pangea, which focuses on counterfeit pharmaceuticals, could be used to enforce a domestic law prohibiting the importation of drugs from legitimate overseas manufacturers. 

Under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, buying legitimate pharmaceuticals online and having them sent to the United States is already illegal in many circumstances, even for personal use, because they have either not been approved by the FDA or have not been screened for safety and efficacy. But these import prohibitions are rarely enforced against individual consumers. There are also a number of exceptions that allow individuals to import small quantities of unapproved prescription drugs if no domestic alternative is available, or to import foreign-made versions of FDA-approved domestic drugs if there are shortages. 

Harned said that if the attorney general used Operation Pangea to establish that “illegal” mifepristone is coming from overseas, the Justice Department could then seize website domains for organizations that provide information about how to order mifepristone from other countries, intercept shipments of the medication and even revisit the Biden administration’s position on an 1873 law known as the Comstock Act.

The Comstock Act prohibits the mailing of “obscene” materials, but it has not been enforced for decades due to free speech protections put in place by the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade, which protected the federal right to an abortion for nearly 50 years, also protected mifepristone access and distribution, until the high court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. 

Democrat Joe Biden was president when Dobbs was decided by a conservative court majority reinforced by Trump during his first term. Biden’s Justice Department took the position that Comstock could not be used to enforce a blanket ban on mailing abortion medications because even in states with bans there are often exceptions — like to save a parent’s life — and there is no way to know the purpose for which they are being mailed. 

Central to the anti-abortion movement’s post-Dobbs strategy to restrict access to medication abortion is revisiting the Comstock Act. But, so far, Trump’s Justice Department has made no move to revamp its Comstock approach. The president told CBS News ahead of his election that it would not be a priority, saying, “The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue.” 

In 2023, 63 percent of all U.S. abortions were done via medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. Roughly 28 percent of all abortions in the United States are now done via medication prescribed via telehealth appointments, according to KFF, a health policy research, polling and journalism organization.

“If they have an attorney general that is actually willing to do something about mifepristone, it is perplexing and strange to me that they would do this really weird, roundabout, ‘I don’t even know why it would work’ thing, when they have Comstock,” said Greer Donley, an abortion law expert at the University of Pittsburgh’s law school who supports abortion rights. 

“But the way you go after Comstock is you put people in handcuffs and you throw them in jail, and that’s going to have political repercussions. So I understand why, politically speaking, it’s less damaging to try to go after websites and providers,” Donley added. 

Abortion opponents have challenged the availability of mifepristone on a number of fronts but made little headway. 

Anti-abortion states have filed legal challenges related to the drug’s 2000 approval by the FDA and to Biden administration changes that made it available via telemedicine and the mail, but the drug remains available nationally as those cases proceed.

The anti-abortion movement has also pushed Trump’s FDA to revisit mifepristone’s approval. In June, the agency announced it would conduct a six-month review of the medication’s safety, notching an interim win for the anti-abortion movement. 

Anti-abortion hardliner Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican representing Missouri, in March introduced legislation to undo the FDA’s mifepristone approval, but the proposed bill has not advanced.