He’s not talking about abortion much on the trail, but the former president has been a dependable ally of the anti-abortion movement and would have powers to act in a second term. Read more at 19th News
State is latest in which the Comstock Act is being used to try to ban abortion after the fall of Roe v Wade Read more at The Guardian
The hopes of some activists go further. Their ultimate aim in reviving the Comstock Act is to use it to shut down every abortion facility “in all 50 states,” Mark Lee Dickson, a Texas pastor and anti-abortion advocate, told me. Taken literally, Comstock could be applied to prevent the transport of all supplies related to … Read more
The anti-abortion movement is—no surprise—committed to stopping this flow of patients and abortion pills across state lines. One strategy that has recently emerged is an effort to revive and reinterpret the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-vice law that the movement claims makes sending or receiving any abortion drug or device in the mail a federal … Read more
Through its reimagined version of the Comstock Act, the right wing seeks to enforce a traditional view of women and their roles, sexual purity and societal control over reproduction, a view that limits what people can say and think, as well as what they can do. In the era of “Don’t Say Gay” mandates and … Read more
At the heart of all these prosecutions, whether targeting men or women, was the same impulse that led to the criminalization of abortion and the passage of the Comstock Act: the desire to control and limit women’s lives in order to protect the traditional family structure and ensure the preservation of both individual family social … Read more
Opinion | Can the 19th Century Law That Banned Walt Whitman Also Ban Abortion by Mail? Fast forward to 2023, and it’s not at all clear how activist judges like Matthew Kacsmaryk believe they can wind back the clock. The Comstock laws have long been superseded by a statutory and legal privacy revolution — beginning … Read more
Judge’s abortion pill decision embraces extreme language and ideology of anti-abortion movement, experts say In interviews, several legal and medical experts said Kacsmaryk’s decision was unprecedented and clearly ideological. His language and reasoning, they said, closely mirrored arguments and concepts put forward by the anti-abortion movement — at the expense of scientific consensus in some … Read more
I called Ziegler today, after the Justice Department’s appeal, to get her take on what happens next. She told me that if the conflicting mifepristone rulings make their way to the Supreme Court, which they’re likely to do, it’s worth noting that the Texas decision that would block the abortion medication was “designed to appeal … Read more
The Texas Abortion-Pill Ruling Signals Pro-Lifers’ Next Push Kacsmaryk’s unprecedented ruling, however, is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills. It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all … Read more
