United States | News & Politics

Prudish even by the standards of the Victorian Age, Anthony Comstock ranks as one of the more bizarre and destructive figures in U.S. history. The founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1873, Comstock boasted of hounding women to suicide by pursuing their prosecution for selling contraceptive pills or assisting abortions. As a federal postal inspector, he once raided an art gallery selling nude paintings, including a reproduction of the “Birth of Venus,” which a court ordered seized. He saw newspapers, magazines and novels as satanic influences for promoting “evil reading” and encouraged destruction of books.

He lobbied for an 1873 federal law that makes it a felony to mail any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” or even any advice on how or where to get an abortion or contraception. Later judicial interpretation prompted removal of the Comstock Act’s prohibition on mailing contraception, but its purported ban on abortion-related supplies is still on the books. Americans were reminded of this astonishing — and troubling — fact at Tuesday’s Supreme Court oral argument over efforts by antiabortion doctors to rescind Food and Drug Administration rules allowing the distribution of mifepristone, used for medical abortions.

... Democrats should lead [the effort to repeal this law] while they still control the Senate and the White House. And they should do so despite understandable fears that trying, and failing, to repeal the law could paradoxically reinforce its validity. It’s a fight worth having. Let House Republicans refuse to consider a bill, or the Senate GOP filibuster one, and explain to voters why they oppose eliminating even the theoretical chance people could get up to five years in prison (the maximum penalty for a first offense) for shipping mifepristone. (The law also applies to express common carriers, such as FedEx and UPS.)

In fact, a number of groups and individuals on the right are trying to revive the Comstock Act. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a second Donald Trump term to which more than 100 conservative groups contributed, says a Trump Justice Department should “announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such [abortion] pills.” Jonathan Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who devised that state’s law encouraging civil lawsuits against abortion providers, has said: “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock.”

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