Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, your cheerful weekly digest of every fresh new way the government would like to manage your uterus. Big week for the fellas. Today: your birth control gets reclassified as abortion, the anti-abortion movement throws a tantrum and gets a present, the Attorney General falls in love with a law from 1873, red states go doctor-hunting across state lines, and the CDC goes dark. Let’s get into it.

We begin with wonderful news for millions of women: your birth control has been quietly reclassified as abortion. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is clear that IUDs and the pill prevent fertilization and are not abortifacients. But the movement needs them to be, because once your contraception is legally an abortion, every abortion ban and every mail restriction they’re building can reach it too. So they got to work. The administration rewrote Title X, the national family planning program, to steer women toward natural family planning, which you may know by its stage name, the rhythm method. Then the EPA added birth control to a list of water contaminants, so the pill is now officially pollution. You can’t ban a thing for being an abortion until you first decide it’s an abortion. And they’ve decided.

Now to a movement in mourning. Last year Republicans passed a one-year ban on Planned Parenthood billing Medicaid for the boring stuff, cancer screenings, birth control, STI testing, none of it abortion, which they’re already barred from funding. That ban expired on July fifth, and the anti-abortion crowd assumed Congress would simply renew it in the next big bill. Congress did not. The new ninety-five-billion-dollar package found room for defense, farm aid, and grants to make voting harder, but somehow no room for their one little wish. So on Thursday they gathered at the Capitol in matching Defund Big Abortion shirts, and Senator Josh Hawley took the microphone to describe cancer screenings as the mutilation of our children. Students for Life was so devastated they gave every single member of Congress an F. And here’s the part they left off the shirts: the Congressional Budget Office scored it, and defunding Planned Parenthood would actually raise federal spending by fifty-two million dollars. Their dream money-saving plan costs money. But the base was sad, so the administration sent a little something to cheer them up.

And that little something was Todd Blanche, the acting Attorney General and Donald Trump’s former personal lawyer, which is exactly the background you want hovering near your prescriptions. At his confirmation hearing this week, Senator Ted Cruz asked him to take a fresh look at the Comstock Act, a delightful anti-obscenity law from 1873, a simpler time, when women couldn’t vote but the postal service was already deeply concerned about them. Blanche would like to use it to stop the abortion pill, mifepristone, from traveling through the mail anywhere in the country. And his evidence was airtight. He told the United States Senate that he saw a video. Not where. Not who made it. Just a video, somewhere, of pills that, in his words, come dumped out of a little plastic bag. Case closed. Then Senator Katie Britt made the strongest case of all. She brought up a woman whose partner had drugged her with abortion pills against her will, and arrived at the solution: take abortion pills away from all women. The abuser walks. You lose access. Chivalry lives.

Several states aren’t waiting for the mail ban. They’ve gone straight for the doctors who prescribe abortion pills. Louisiana has an extradition order out for Dr. Margaret Carpenter for the crime of writing a prescription. Texas is chasing another provider for a hundred thousand dollars over pills mailed into the state. California watched all this and wrote a bill to require its future governors to refuse those extradition requests, for doctors who provide abortion pills or gender-affirming