Editorial Excerpts, June 2024

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. … 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. …

Though the justices seemed likely to back the FDA for other reasons, the emergence of the Comstock Act from legal dormancy could foreshadow more conservative attempts to use it against reproductive freedom — in a post-Roe world where nearly two-thirds of all abortions are now carried out by medication. It should never come to that: Congress needs to repeal the law.

… One way or the other, this obsolete, misogynist law needs to be wiped off the statute books.

– The Washington Post, April 2, 2024

… The Comstock Act was named for moral crusader Anthony Comstock, who used his power as a U.S. postal inspector to arrest and convict people under the act for such offenses as mailing information about sex, contraception, and anything related to abortion. …

In the current case, the plaintiffs maintain that the Comstock Act says plainly that abortion drugs cannot be sent through the mail, period. The Biden administration has taken the position that the Comstock prohibition on mailing abortion-related materials doesn’t apply when it’s mailed to states where abortion remains legal.

And that’s where the nightmare scenario comes in that some abortion-rights advocates have been warning of: Suppose a future presidential administration, intent on ending abortion rights everywhere, interprets the Comstock Act to prohibit all mailing of abortion-related materials, even those bound for states where the procedure is legal. …

In the most chilling version of that scenario, a future presidential administration wouldn’t even have to get past Congress. It could simply interpret the Comstock Act differently than the Biden administration does in its application to mailing abortion materials and — presto! — de facto national abortion ban.

Is that possibility the overblown panic-mongering that some abortion-rights opponents say it is? That was an easier argument to make before two Supreme Court justices suggested that a law written long before women were even allowed to vote might have some bearing on their modern right to reproductive health care. …

– St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 2, 2024