What’s at stake in the Supreme Court mifepristone case Legal scholars like Ziegler also note that there’s an even bigger way that this case could affect everyone in the country. “You have, lurking in the background, the possibility that the Comstock Act is going to be reinvented as an abortion ban,” she says. Read more … Read more
The question people should be asking is whether Trump will give free rein to the anti-abortion advisers in his orbit, Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the UC Davis School of Law, told me. The big thing those advisers are pushing for is the reinterpretation and enforcement of the Comstock Act. As I wrote in … Read more
The plans are already beginning to take shape. As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Republicans have floated enforcing the Comstock Act, a zombie law from the 19th century, to criminalize the inter-state shipping of abortion medication. The outdated law also includes broad prohibitions on the mailing of materials considered “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy, or … Read more
We know abortion is a loser for Republicans, but if they’re able to talk their way around it, that could mean another Trump administration and the end of reproductive freedom in this country. It could mean the beginning of an FDA that is dictated by religious beliefs and not by scientific ones. Removing the FDA … Read more
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
