#comstock act

[tomorrowusa]

Donald Trump wants voters to forget that he killed Roe v. Wade. Don't let people forget what he did.

Trump’s fundamental disinterest in the truth value of his words is the only context that matters for his comments on abortion Monday morning. In a direct-to-camera statement on Truth Social, the former president told his audience that he does not support a national ban on abortion. “My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint,” Trump said. “The states will determine by vote or legislation or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land. In this case, the law of the state.” [ ... ] Compared with the mounting push from anti-abortion activists to ban the procedure nationwide, however, Trump’s stance is designed to look almost moderate. And if you were born yesterday, you could even say that Trump was beginning his pivot to the center, to blur the difference on abortion between himself and other Republicans. [ ... ] The truth of the matter is that given a second term in office, Trump and his allies will do everything in their power to ban abortion nationwide, with or without a Republican majority in Congress. Recall that in his 2016 campaign, Trump said that there had to be “some form” of punishment for women who had abortions. Later, as president, he backed a House bill that would have banned abortion after 20 weeks. Anti-abortion strategists have not been shy about their plan to use the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law, as legal authority for executive actions to limit abortions throughout the country, in blue states as well as red ones. [ ... ] We already know what he wants, what he’ll do and what he’ll sign. Trump landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.

In his own words, Trump brags about killing Roe v. Wade to an adoring Fox News audience this year.

[laurelindebear]

Hey there, US voters! Do you or anyone you know use birth control for contraception or to treat medical conditions? Then please vote to keep people who want to ban it - all of it - out of office, and make your the people in your circle know about this stuff too.

Combine the push for Comstock (which will also impact all other kinds of 'adult' or 'obscene' things, like art which includes nudity, sex toys and aides, and ofc anything queer) with the push to end no-fault divorce and the already-existing breaches of reproductive freedom, and a Republican-led future looks bleak.

[porterdavis]

A national abortion ban is just the election of a GQP president away due to an obscure 1873 law that the right is dying to enforce.

The Comstock Act is on the books and only needs a president to tell the Justice Department to start enforcing it.

The right won't talk about it openly, but they sure intend to enforce it.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Alanna Vagianos at HuffPost:

Vice President Kamala Harris hosted a campaign event in Arizona on Friday following the state Supreme Court’s recent ruling that an 1864 near-total abortion ban can go into effect. “Here in Arizona, they have turned the back the clock to the 1800s to take away a woman’s most fundamental right, the right to make decisions over her own body,” Harris told a crowd in Tucson. “The overturning of Roe was, without any question, a seismic event. And this ban here in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet.” The near-total ban won’t go into effect until 45 days after the Arizona Supreme Court issues its formal ruling.

The Arizona high court greenlit the reinstatement of the archaic abortion law — which predates Arizona’s statehood — earlier this week. It bans nearly all abortions except for when the pregnant person’s life is at risk. It also carries a felony punishment of two to five years in prison for abortion providers. Harris emphasized how important the outcome of the 2024 election will be for reproductive rights, adding that former President Donald Trump will sign a national abortion ban if reelected in the fall. “We all must understand who is to blame. Former President Donald Trump did this,” Harris said. “Donald Trump is the architect of this health care crisis. And that is not a fact, by the way, that he hides. In fact, he brags about it.”

Harris warned that if reelected, Trump could choose to enforce the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that states it’s illegal to send “obscene” materials in the mail including items that relate to sexual health and contraception. Anti-choice conservative groups have laid out a plan to enforce the zombie law and create a backdoor national abortion ban. “Just like what he did in Arizona, he basically wants to take America back to the 1800s,” Harris said. “But we are not going to let that happen.” Trump has continually boasted about his role in appointing the three Supreme Court justices who were critical in repealing Roe v. Wade. The presumptive GOP presidential nominee said this week that he believes abortion rights should be left to the states, but later said the Arizona ruling went too far. He also claimed he would not sign a national abortion ban if he gets to the White House, though past reporting suggests he has at least considered implementing a 15- or 16-week ban. Trump, who has aligned himself with extreme anti-abortion groups, could still enact the Comstock Act or direct the Food and Drug Administration to roll back access to abortion pills.

VP Kamala Harris is correct: Donald Trump is the root cause for all the abortion bans being enacted.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Mike Luckovich, Atlanta Journal Constitution

* * * * *

No More Mifepristone

Joyce Vance

On the Friday before Easter, just after the end of the workweek in Texas, a federal judge in Amarillo decided that Mifepristone, one of two key drugs used for medicated abortion, should be banned. This despite 20 years of data showing it’s safe and effective. Mifepristone has a lower rate of complications than Tylenol.

The judge also entered a stay, which means his order won’t go into effect for seven days. He did it to give the government an opportunity to appeal. But if neither the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, deeply conservative after a tranche of Trump appointments, nor the Supreme Court orders a lengthier extension, legal access to Mifepristone will come to an end. Not just in Texas, but nationwide.

The government didn’t need seven days. It filed its appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals a few hours after the decision.

DOJ was prepared to file immediately because they understood the inevitable ruling in this case. Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who the plaintiffs judge-shopped for by filing this case in the Amarillo division where virtually all cases are assigned to him, has a background of deep antagonism to letting pregnant people make their own decisions. Kacsmaryk’s legal ruling affects the entire country, not just Texas. A federal district judge in Washington State entered a ruling ordering the FDA to keep Mifepristone on the market, just moments after the Texas ruling. But Kacsmaryk entered a nationwide injunction that rescinds the FDA’s approval of Mifepristone nationwide—even in states where abortion is still legal and without exception for the mother’s health.

That’s not the legal landscape the Supreme Court said it was creating when it ended 50 years of abortion rights under Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs case. When the Court decided Dobbs, it said decisions about whether and under what circumstances abortion should be legal would be left up to each state. But now, Judge Kacsmaryk has made that decision for all of us—you and me, for our mothers, daughters, sisters, aunts, and friends, regardless of medical necessity or our personal religious and moral beliefs. Judge Kacsmaryk knows best.

Challenged legal rulings are typically stayed to preserve the status quo while appeals work their way through the courts. But the post-Trump, uber-conservative Supreme Court has always had a different jurisprudence when it comes to abortion, permitting restrictive measures like Texas’s SB-8 vigilante-justice law to go into effect while the appeal was pending. Nothing says “result-oriented” like special rules for anti-abortion litigants (to say nothing of reversing the long-standing precedent of Roe that had worked well to balance rights and did not meet the Court’s test for when precedent should be reversed). It’s tempting to think the Court might decide the Mifepristone decision is a bridge too far, if not based on legal principles and the expectations it set when it decided Dobbs, then out of purely pragmatic political considerations some of Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friends might want to see in order to avoid steep Republican losses at the polls following yet another anti-abortion decision. But it’s difficult to imagine this Court walking it back so close to its goal of extinguishing abortion rights. DOJ has strong arguments to make on appeal—compelling ones on threshold issues like whether the plaintiffs had standing to bring this case, as well as on the merits. Whether the Court will give them a fair hearing is an entirely different matter.

Soon we’ll find out if the Court meant it when it said abortion would be up to the states. Or if one judge in Texas can resurrect the long-disfavored Comstock Act and terminate people’s rights across America. The Act is an 1873 law that makes it illegal to advertise or mail anything, including information, related to preventing contraception or producing abortion (as well as outlawing sending “obscene, lewd or lascivious,” “immoral,” or “indecent” publications). The Comstock Act fell into disuse because of its effect on First Amendment rights—it involves prior restraint by the government on speech. The prohibition on materials and items related to contraception was removed after the Supreme Court’s 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, which held that Connecticut’s “mini-Comstock” law unconstitutionally invaded the privacy rights of married couples. Be concerned about where a resuscitation of this law could lead.

Restricting abortion today does not seem to be about good-faith conservative values and protecting the sanctity of life. It’s hard to believe that a party that denies access to basic medical care and education and that lets schoolkids die at the hands of mass shooters in the name of the Second Amendment is deeply committed to unborn children, unless it’s become somehow morally righteous to protect them only until they leave the womb. Ending abortion is a political rallying cry, used to bring voters to the polls and raise money, with a healthy side effect of owning uppity liberal women.

It’s really not that difficult: If you’re against abortion, don’t get one. We live in a pluralistic society and there are religions other than conservative Christianity, for instance Judaism, that command their followers to protect the life of a mother over that of an unborn fetus. Somehow their rights are now ignored, while a minority that has gained control of the Supreme Court dictates to the rest of us.

Interestingly, banning Mifepristone isn’t just part of the trend to make abortion less available; it’s also part of the trend to make it less safe and to endanger women’s lives. I spoke with Jesanna Cooper, a friend and a doctor in Birmingham, who is an experienced Ob-Gyn. She told me, “The take-home is that without mifepristone, more people will hemorrhage and/or get septic from incomplete expulsion of the products of conception.” Using Misoprostol, the other drug used in a medication abortion procedure, alone is “less effective,” she says. It involves the “same amount of pain but [is] more likely to be incomplete, which can be dangerous.” It doesn’t sound very pro-life.

More information about the two drugs, if you want to read some of the science, is here.

In 1996 then-Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (D-CO) tried to convince the House to take the Comstock Act off the books. They didn’t. But her floor speech has resonance today. She explained that the Act was named for a man named Anthony Comstock, who “was one of these people who decided only he knew what was virtuous and right, and somehow he managed to convince all sorts of people that this was correct.” That sounds familiar.

She continued, “Anthony Comstock was a religious fanatic who spent his life in a personal crusade for moral purity—as defined, of course, by himself. This crusade resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of a multitude of Americans whose only crime was to exercise their constitutional right of free speech in ways that offended Anthony Comstock. Women seemed to particularly offend Anthony Comstock, most particularly women who believed in the right to plan their families through the use of contraceptives, or in the right of women to engage in discussions and debate about matters involving sexuality, including contraception and abortion.” We don’t need a new Anthony Comstock, and we don’t need Judge Kacsmaryk to dictate health care—or the absence of it—to people across the country.

You know what the solution is: go vote. Democrats will need sufficient majorities in both houses of Congress to restore protections for abortion. It’s not enough to win the House or the Senate; Democrats must take both to ensure access to abortion, and 2024 is not that far off.

We’re in this together,

Joyce

[Civil Discourse With Joyce Vance]

[gaykarstaagforever]

GOP: "Let's revert back to laws from before women could vote! That will show them!"

I don't know what political reality they're living in where they think they can declare half the population state-owned incubators with no rights, when those people CAN actually vote now.

Or is that the next thing Clarence Thomas is going to nullify because it would have made his headcanon Thomas Jefferson upset?

[thoughtportal]

FOSTA-SESTA was the start of this

[nodynasty4us]

From the November 17, 2023 story:

[The] Heritage [Foundation] argues, the United States already has a national ban, and all that is required is a conservative president willing to enforce it.

...

The story behind Heritage’s claim begins in the 19th century, with the passage of a sexual purity law that was interpreted to make it a crime to mail or receive items intended, designed, or adapted for abortion. Exactly what the Comstock Act said or meant, not least when it came to abortion, was unclear at the time it passed. States were then, for the first time, criminalizing abortion early in pregnancy, with life exceptions. Members of Congress seemed unsure whether the act covered “lawful” or medically indicated abortion.

...

Progressives may be skeptical about the importance of a second Biden term when the president has sometimes avoided even saying the word abortion and when the prospect of federal abortion protections is far off. What is clear is that the architects of Project 2025 are confident that a second Trump term could be just as transformative for abortion rights as the first one was. Courtesy of Anthony Comstock, and regardless of whether Congress lifts a finger, an abortion ban is on the ballot—whether or not voters want one.

[saywhat-politics]

In this op-ed, Rachael Klarman and Will Dobbs-Allsopp of Governing for Impact explain the threat posed to abortion rights by a little-known 19th century law, the Comstock Act.

The 2024 presidential election is officially underway, yet the race’s gravest stake has received alarmingly little attention: Prominent conservatives have a plan for the next anti-choice president to ban abortion nationwide without an act of Congress—and it may well succeed.

Their secret weapon is the long-dormant Comstock Act, a 19th century law still on the books, which states that to ship, carry, or receive “any drug, medicine, article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” would be a federal crime. If your eyes are blinking in disbelief, we felt similarly when we first read the statute — though organizers and writers have been trying to draw attention to the threat for the past several months. Given the riotous state of American abortion politics, how can nationwide restrictions potentially already exist in federal law, yet receive so little mainstream attention?

In part, as one prominent anti-abortion lawyer has explained, because some in the movement deliberately kept silent about their Comstock agenda until after the fall of Roe v. Wade. With Roe overturned, however, organizations, including one headed by former Trump aide Stephen Miller, intend to leverage the law to impose a nationwide ban on medication abortion — and perhaps go further — should the White House flip in 2024.

For the moment, the Comstock Act remains largely neutered. In 2022, the Department of Justice indicated that, in its view, the law was effectively unenforceable. The federal government enjoys broad prosecutorial discretion – nobody but the Department of Justice gets to decide when to bring federal charges – so anti-abortion activists have been unable to realize their Comstock ambitions under this administration. But prosecutorial postures can change.

[coochiequeens]

On March 3, 1873 Congress passed the Comstock Act. Ladies reblog because now we can share information about birth control and sexual health.

https://www.history.com/news/comstock-act-1873-obscenity-contraception-mail

How an Anti-Obscenity Crusader Policed America's Mail for Decades

Anthony Comstock convinced Congress that US mail was filled with filth. After they passed the Comstock Act, he became a fervent one-man censor.

Anthony Comstock knew obscenity when he saw it, and the famous anti-vice crusader saw it everywhere. From the 1870s into the early 20th century, the dry goods salesman-turned-self-appointed-censor was a man on a mission—to impose his sense of morality on what Americans read, saw and even did in their own bedrooms. 

Though not an elected legislator, the devout Protestant, who was appalled by the sexual permissiveness he witnessed in New York City, largely rewrote federal postal laws "to prevent the mails from being used to corrupt the public morals." And he got a compliant Congress to pass them. Some historians suggest that the politicians were looking for an issue that would divert public attention from the Credit Mobilier scandal, in which many of them were involved.

While there were already laws on the books against obscenity, Comstock managed to expand the scope of “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material to include information on birth control and abortion. 

The post office made him a special agent, with the power to conduct raids and arrest suspected violators. He exercised that authority with gusto for the next 42 years, claiming credit for nearly 4,000 convictions, 160 tons of destroyed books and other materials and at least 15 suspects driven to suicide. 

Up to his death in 1915, Comstock was admired in some quarters for his moral rectitude—and ridiculed in others as a prig and a busybody. Today, he may seem like a relic of the Victorian Age, but his laws affected American life for decades and his spirit lives on in the never-ending battles over censorship, free speech, the right to privacy and the proper role of government in citizens’ lives.

Comstock’s ‘Chamber of Horrors’

In 1872, Comstock began visiting Washington, D.C. to lobby lawmakers for stricter vice laws. In one celebrated show-and-tell presentation in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s office, he wowed Senators with a selection of dirty books, pornographic playing cards and contraceptive devices. He referred to the collection as his “Chamber of Horrors.” 

Comstock had already made a name for himself in New York as the leader of the YMCA’s Committee for the Suppression of Vice. He used his position to confiscate and destroy books and other materials he believed could corrupt the morals of young men. The law that allowed him to carry out his raids, New York’s Obscene Literature Act of 1868, also gave him a cut of any fines.

But Comstock had grander ambitions—not just to clean up New York, but the entire country. 

In 1873, he got his way when Congress passed An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use. It became commonly known as the Comstock Act. 

Days after the law passed, the post office gave him the authority to enforce his own rules. While other obscenity laws allowed Comstock to conduct raids on booksellers and publishers and harass art gallery owners with nude paintings on exhibit, the Comstock laws technically required that the material pass through the mail before he could take action.

Rather than wait for that to happen, Comstock would send away for materials on contraception and other forbidden topics using assumed names. “In some cases, he concocted entire families, individuals sharing a last name, living in the same town,” Amy Sohn reports her 2021 book about Comstock, The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship and Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age. When the packages arrived, he pounced.

The federal Comstock laws weren’t universally loved, and there were numerous attempts to repeal them on the federal level. Many state legislatures embraced them with enthusiasm, however, and more than half the states enacted their own Comstock laws in succeeding years. Some were harsher than the federal original. 

Meanwhile, legislators continued to tinker with the 1873 law. In 1908, for example, it banned as “indecent” any material that might “incite arson, murder or assassination.” This was an era when concern over anarchism and socialism ran high and, as Sohn notes, Comstock’s law was “evolving to meet the times.” 

Comstock’s attacks on contraception happened to coincide with the growing women’s rights movement, for which family planning and women’s control of their own bodies were core issues. 

The anarchist activist Emma Goldman and the birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger were two of his more prominent targets, and they returned the favor by denouncing him in their publications and from the lecture stage. 

In 1914, he arranged to have Sanger indicted over the contents of her magazine The Woman Rebel, which he called “obscene, lewd and lascivious.” Threatened with a potential 45-year prison term, she fled the country, but returned to face trial in 1915. The case was dismissed the following year when the government dropped the charges. 

Meanwhile, Comstock died of pneumonia in September 1915, at age 71. He had continued his crusade to the end, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Appointed by President Woodrow Wilson as U.S. delegate to the International Purity Conference in San Francisco, he was disturbed to see naked mannequins in department store windows there (apparently still being worked on by window-dressers) and decided to make a federal case of it. He lost.

Comstock Laws After Comstock

Over the course of the 20th century, court rulings would gradually whittle away at the original Comstock laws and their state imitators. But every now and then, publishers and the public would be reminded that the law was still on the books.

In 1943, the postmaster general moved to take away Esquiremagazine’s second-class mailing privileges on the grounds that some of its cartoons and other contents were obscene. (Less-expensive second-class mail was vital for many magazines’ survival.) The case dragged on until 1946 before the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court’s verdict in Esquire’s favor. 

In 1955 a new postmaster denied Playboy magazine’s request for a second-class permit, prompting publisher Hugh Hefner to remark that, “We don’t think Postmaster General Summerfield has any business editing magazines. He should stick to delivering mail.” Like Esquire, Playboy prevailed in court. 

These days, the postal laws rarely make headlines or lead to major court cases. While would-be censors of various political persuasions periodically call for greater restraints on social media and the Internet, that cause has yet to find its own Anthony Comstock. 

[archaalen]

How the Comstock Act could be used to ban abortion nationwide https://www.npr.org/2024/04/10/1243802678/abortion-comstock-act

[figtreeandvine]

None of us should have to know what the Comstock Act is. But if you live in the US and don't know what it is, go look it up.

[worshiptheglitch]

[plethoraworldatlas]

Rep. Cori Bush on Tuesday called for the repeal of a long-obsolete law that anti-abortion activists, lawmakers, and judges have worked to revive as part of their nationwide assault on reproductive rights.

"The Comstock Act must be repealed," Bush (D-Mo.) wrote in a social media post on Tuesday as the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case brought by a group of anti-abortion doctors aiming to curtail access to mifepristone—a medication used in more than 60% of U.S. abortions.

"Enacted in 1873, it is a zombie statute, a dead law that the far-right is trying to reanimate," Bush warned. "The anti-abortion movement wants to weaponize the Comstock Act as a quick route to a nationwide medication abortion ban. Not on our watch."

Bush's office said she was the first member of Congress to demand the law's repeal since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the summer of 2022.

The Comstock Act, which hasn't been applied in a century and was repeatedly narrowed following its enactment, prohibits the mailing of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that "may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion." Legal experts have described the dormant law as the "most significant national threat to reproductive rights."

Given that "virtually everything used for an abortion—from abortion pills, to the instruments for abortion procedures, to clinic supplies—gets mailed to providers in some form," a trio of experts wrote earlier this year, the anti-abortion movement's "interpretation of the Comstock Act could mean a nationwide ban on all abortions, even in states where it remains legal."