This 'Orwellian' 1870s law could help Republicans enforce a nationwide abortion ban: report

17 April 2023

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito and other GOP appointees made a states' rights argument and emphasized that going forward, individual states would be able to determine abortion's legality or illegality. By overturning Roe, the 5-4 majority argued, they were letting individual states decide what abortion policies were best for them.

Yet former Vice President Mike Pence and other socially conservative Republicans are calling for a national abortion standard — specifically, a federal law banning abortion in all 50 states. Journalist Madison Pauly, in an article published by Mother Jones on April 17, describes a GOP blueprint for bringing that about if Republicans recapture the White House and the U.S. Senate in 2024. And central to their plans, she stresses, are the Comstock laws of the 1870s.

Anthony Comstock was a 19th Century activist and precursor to the modern Religious Right who pushed for federal laws that made it illegal to use the U.S. Postal Service to mail contraception, literature promoting sex education and other things he opposed.

"The law at issue — the Comstock Act, named after 1800s anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock — is an Orwellian, puritanical, Victorian-era statute that criminalizes the mailing of 'every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,'" Pauly explains. "Comstock himself, a former Civil War solider who moved to New York only to be scandalized by its thriving vice district, was fixated on eradicating pornography, which he considered to be anything remotely related to sex, according to the historian Lauren MacIvor Thompson. As an activist enforcer of New York anti-vice laws, he collected and destroyed mountains of books, art, contraception, sex education manuals, and women’s rights literature — and some of it, he brought to Washington, D.C. on a lobbying trip."

A future right-wing GOP presidential administration, Pauly warns, could use the Comstock laws not only to attack an abortion drug such as mifepristone, but other items as well.

"Under a literal reading of the law," the reporter explains, "federal prosecutors could file criminal charges against almost any individuals or companies that ship medications or equipment to be used for abortion."

Read Mother Jones' full report at this link.

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