Attorney General Todd Blanche poses a "huge threat" as he stands poised to wield the Justice Department against abortion rights, Guardian legal columnist Moira Donegan warned.

In a Saturday opinion piece titled "Trump’s new attorney general poses a huge threat to abortion rights," Donegan argued that the newly confirmed attorney general is positioned to complete the transformation of the DOJ into an instrument for restricting access to mifepristone nationwide. She described Blanche as "an anti-abortion zealot" who has been "shockingly subservient" to Trump.

The stakes of any federal move against mifepristone extend well beyond the states that ban abortion. The drug, approved by the FDA in 2000 and used with misoprostol for medication abortion, accounted for roughly two-thirds of all US abortions by 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights.

Blanche "seems poised to complete the president's long-brewing transformation of the country's chief law enforcement agency into a vehicle for score settling, personal vendettas, distributing favors to the administration's friends and suppressing dissent from its political enemies," Donegan wrote.

What Donegan finds "most incendiary" centers on what Blanche has said he intends to do with the office. On a call organized by the White House faith office days before his confirmation, Blanche reportedly told the religious group Intercessors for America that the department was working "so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state," according to Donegan. The Dobbs decision is the Supreme Court's 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, ended the federal constitutional right to abortion and returned regulation to the states — producing the current patchwork of bans in Republican-led states and protections in Democratic-led ones.

"We don't have complete victory yet," Blanche said. "But we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent."

Donegan laid out several paths available to Blanche, none of which require new legislation. He could revive the Comstock Act, a dormant 1873 statute, to ban the mailing of abortion pills, she warned. The law broadly barred sending contraceptive and abortion materials through the mail and has not been enforced against abortion drugs in the modern era, but anti-abortion advocates have long argued it already authorizes such a ban. He could sue to strike down the shield laws that let doctors in Democratic states ship medication to patients in states with bans — protections enacted since Dobbs by more than a dozen Democratic-led states, including California, New York and Washington. He could also reverse the DOJ's current position defending the drug's online availability — a stance that will be tested when the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit hears a Louisiana challenge next month, Donegan noted. That case is the second major courtroom test of mifepristone's federal rules: in 2024, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge from anti-abortion doctors and groups on standing grounds in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, leaving the underlying legal questions unresolved.

According to Donegan, Trump has moved cautiously on the issue of abortion rights since returning to office. "He appears to have been spooked by the political reaction to Dobbs, which was credited for the Democrats' better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterms," Donegan wrote. That political reaction extended beyond one election cycle: in 2022 and 2023, voters in states including Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio sided with abortion-rights positions on statewide ballot measures.