(LifeSiteNews) – A group of shareholders is urging FedEx to heed the legal jeopardy it could invite if it participates in shipping abortion pills across the United States.
The Daily Wire reported that Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorneys prepared a shareholder resolution introduced this week at the company’s annual meeting, laying out that (though not currently enforced) the federal Comstock Act forbids using “any express company or common carrier” to ship any “drug (or) medicine (…) designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion”; and more than 20 states forbid abortion pills within their borders, with multiple ongoing challenges to the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) lax abortion pill rules.
“In light of such laws and recent developments, the Board of Directors of FedEx should evaluate the legal and reputational risk associated with participating in the distribution of mail-order abortion drugs such as mifepristone and consider not participating in such distribution chain going forward,” the resolution urges. “To do otherwise exposes FedEx to significant legal and reputational risk and potential criminal liability.”
The FedEx board initially balked at the statement, claiming it already had “robust risk management” to ensure compliance with relevant laws, and therefore the “proposal would result in unnecessary expense and burdens with limited benefit to our stockholders.” But shareholder votes must still be tallied before the proposal is adopted or rejected.
“FedEx prohibits the shipment of Kinder Surprise Eggs” (due to the choking hazard of small toys inside the candy), noted Pia de Solenni, vice president for corporate engagement of Catholic capital advisory firm IWP Capital, who introduced the resolution. “If the company can prohibit a candy toy, it can prohibit a drug that violates the law in more than 20 states and has harmed a growing number of women, not to mention destroyed countless human lives.”
In January 2023, the Biden Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) declared, in effect, that the abortion drug provision of the Comstock Act did not mean what it said. According to OLC, abortion pills could be freely mailed, delivered, and received “where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully.” And because “there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may use these drugs, including to produce an abortion, without violating state law,” the “mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.”
While running to return to the White House in 2024, President Donald Trump declared that he would not reverse that change. So far, he has stuck to that promise, to the frustration of pro-lifers, but the administration has promised a review of abortion pill safety data that pro-lifers hope might lead to a reversal sometime after the November midterm elections.
Mail-order abortion pills have become the abortion lobby’s most potent tool for circumventing these laws and preserving “choice” without Roe v. Wade. The latest data from the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found 1,125,930 clinical abortions in 2025, a slight increase from 2024, that Guttmacher attributed in large part to abortion pills. Planned Parenthood’s 2024-2025 annual report boasts it alone committed 434,450 abortions, a record number for the organization and 8% more than the previous year.
Yet completely disconnecting the pills from medical supervision magnifies their already-established risks. Pro-lifers point to an April 2025 analysis by the Ethics & Public Policy Center (EPPC) that concluded almost 11% of women suffer sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, or other major conditions after taking mifepristone, according to insurance data, plus similar findings by the Restoration of America Foundation, as part of a “growing body of evidence indicating that the health risks associated with mifepristone abortions are severe, widespread, and significantly underreported.”