Ever wonder how abortion was originally outlawed in the US?
A large part of it is down to a guy named Horatio Storer, who would eventually go on to found modern gynecology. And his reasons for getting abortion outlawed in the second half of the 1800's and the reasons it's outlawed today are sadly similar: greed, racism, and a supervillainous level of misogyny which, frankly, makes me wonder why he chose a profession where he has to interact with women's bodies instead of doing something like going off to live in some male-only monastery in Outer Mongolia where he could make sure no woman got within ten miles of him.
Oh, and none of it was from a position of wanting to protect life.
The Greed
Most births at the time were handled by midwives. Doctors who treated pregnant women were looked down upon. So his solution was to demonize abortion, and then demonize midwives as abortionists, and then he and his fellow gynecologists could step in and take over an entirely open field of medicine.
The Racism
At the time, most abortions were done on middle or upper class white protestant women. Storer was afraid that if this trend continued, then the United States would be filled by Chinese migrants, freed slaves, and Catholics. The only real difference between him and the great replacement theory championed by the current presidential administration is that today Irish and Catholics are considered white.
The Misygony
In order to support his claims that midwives were unable to handle birth, he also had to claim that women in general were unable to know their own bodies. Abortion at the time was legal before the quickening, which is when a woman first feels movement. So he started to claim that a pregnant woman might not know when she feels her baby move.
And as for how we know he wasn't really pro-life? There's his book "The Origins of Insanity in Women", where he declared that if a woman was "profane or obscene, despondent or self-indulgent, shrewish or fatuous" - basically if she behaved in any way that Storer didn't approve of, which was just as a cash register - then the prescribed treatment should be sterilization.
Pretty hard to be pro-life if you think that a woman should be sterilized because she tells you to fuck off.
The Catastrophe That Was (Is) Comstock Part 1: The Pandora’s Box of Abortion Opposition Part 2: How It Started: The Possessed Postal Inspect
So it may well be that the initial way Trump’s second administration will seek to eliminate access to safe abortion care is by making sure the medication most often used just isn’t available, whether through FDA actions or state ones. But there is also a potentially far more comprehensive strategy Trump might embrace, which has much broader ramifications for public health and civil rights. That’s the Comstock Act; a piece of 19th century federal legislation that is currently a “zombie law,” meaning it’s been largely dormant in recent decades, but was never repealed – and so, it could spring to life again, wreaking havoc.
A defunct federal law is Republicans’ best hope of banning abortion throughout the United States.
Ian Millhiser at Vox:
Donald Trump is speaking out of both sides of his mouth on abortion.
On the one hand, Trump frequently claims credit for the Supreme Court’s decision eliminating the constitutional right to an abortion — and well he should, since the three Republicans he appointed to the Supreme Court all joined the Court’s 2022 decision permitting abortion bans. As Trump told Fox News last summer, “I did something that no one thought was possible. I got rid of Roe v. Wade.”
At the same time, Trump at least claims that he has no interest in signing new federal legislation banning abortion. When a reporter asked Trump if he would sign such a ban last month, Trump’s answer was an explicit “no.”
Behind the scenes, however, many of Trump’s closest allies tout a plan to ban abortion in all 50 states that doesn’t require any new federal legislation whatsoever. The linchpin of this plan is the Comstock Act, a long-defunct, 1873 law that, among other things, purports to ban “any drug, medicine, article, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion” from being mailed or otherwise transported by an “express company” such as UPS or FedEx.
Anyone who violates this law faces up to five years in prison — and the maximum sentence doubles for repeat offenders. Thus, anyone who delivers an abortion medication, or any device used in a surgical abortion, could potentially face such extraordinary sanctions that the transit of such goods would shut down.
Many of the leading proponents of using Comstock to ban all abortions, moreover, are likely to be very influential within a second Trump administration, if such a thing occurs. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, for example, touts enforcing Comstock to ban abortion medication in its 920-page mega-white paper outlining policies for Trump.
Similarly, Jonathan Mitchell, one of Trump’s personal lawyers and the architect of a Texas law that allows virtually anyone to collect bounties from abortion providers, bragged to the New York Times that “we don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books.”
There are very strong legal arguments that Comstock cannot actually be used to effectively ban abortion, at least in places where abortion is legal. The law has not been seriously enforced for nearly a century, and a long line of court decisions stretching back to at least 1915 have read the Comstock Act narrowly to prevent it from being used as a general ban on all abortions.
Still, these precedents are only meaningful if the Supreme Court chooses to follow them, and betting on the same justices who overruled Roe to honor previous pro-abortion decisions is always a dangerous bet. It will get even more dangerous if Trump gets to appoint more justices.
And, even if the Court ultimately decided to follow past decisions reading Comstock narrowly, months or years would likely pass between the Trump Justice Department’s decision to file criminal charges under the Comstock Act, and a Supreme Court decision halting that prosecution. In the interim, few, if any, distributors of medications and medical supplies are likely to risk shipping anything that could lead to themselves being prosecuted.
[...]
So where does the Comstock Act come from?
The Comstock Act is a relic, not just of a more prudish era in American history, but of an age when the sort of individual rights that modern Americans take for granted effectively did not exist.
Much of the law is unconstitutionally vague. It purports to make it a crime to mail “every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,” for “any indecent or immoral purpose.” Comstock and similar laws inspired a century of litigation just to determine what the word “obscene” means, and it’s anyone’s guess which items are “lewd,” “filthy,” or “vile.”
Similarly, the law imposes a strict censorship code, targeting any “writing” that can be used “for any indecent or immoral purpose” — a provision that violates any plausible understanding of the First Amendment right to free speech.
The Comstock Act’s namesake is Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century anti-vice crusader who wielded it and similar state laws against artists, authors, and reproductive health providers as indiscriminately as he wielded it against actual pornographers. Comstock once successfully brought criminal charges against an art gallery owner for selling reproductions of famous nude paintings. He also bragged, after a woman he arrested for selling contraceptive pills died by suicide, that she was the 15th person targeted by one of his investigations to take her own life.
[...]
Many Republican judges, meanwhile, have been quite willing to revive long-dead abortion bans now that Roe is no longer around. Just last month, for example, Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstated a Civil War era ban on abortions — although the state legislature quickly moved to repeal that ban.
All of which is a long way of saying that the current status of the Comstock Act is highly uncertain, and will depend on who sits on the Supreme Court if and when the Justice Department decides to bring a prosecution under this law. And, even in the best-case scenario, if a future Justice Department is willing to do so, the mere threat of a Comstock prosecution is likely to shut down access to abortion pills (and potentially to surgical equipment used to perform abortions) throughout the country.
The Comstock Act, a long-dormant act, is on a revival in recent years, as anti-abortion extremists are using it as a tool to ban abortion without the need to enact a new law.
This could become scarily true if Donald Trump wins again.
I notice Betty's line of vision shifts between the two variants. It turns it into sequential art -- she is now taking it in, gazing up and down with that... very happy smile... on her face.
"Banned in Boston" is a term that fell by the wayside as the Warren court sided on behalf of a bunch of literary and artistic efforts against charges of obscenity -- leaving aside the founding Boston Puritan and the powerful stranglehold of Anthony Comstock. No longer were there abrupt shutdowns on movies and plays, an authority coming down the aisle shouting "I've seen enough!". There was in the field of comics a famous example of an EC parody for 'Night Before Christmas' and an issue of Panic, seemingly making a goof on suicide, that got that one "banned in Boston". But that's edgy humor you would never see in Archie Comics of old.
Incidentally -- Betty does come back to that seat positioning a time or two sitting, watching as Veronica models this or that attire. Interesting arrangement.
The Comstock Act is part of a federal case over access to abortion pills. A historical science-fiction writer weighs in on the legacy of 19th-century prudishness
Last Friday the Supreme Court issued a stay on a lower court ruling that revoked the Food and Drug Administration’s more than 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, one of two medications that have been prescribed together for decades in the U.S. to end unwanted pregnancies. The ruling temporarily preserves access to a safe and effective abortion medication while the case goes through appeals.
Two weeks earlier Texas district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk had ruled in favor of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, a group of antiabortion organizations and doctors demanding the withdrawal of mifepristone’s FDA approval. The Department of Justice and the drug’s manufacturer, Danco Laboratories, quickly appealed the decision. About a week later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals only partially stayed the ruling, maintaining mifepristone’s approval but restricting its distribution by mail. The Supreme Court decision removes that limit for now.
Kacsmaryk’s initial ruling and the Fifth Circuit decision cited a 19th-century law known as the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to send “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials by mail—including not just nude drawings but also materials or information related to abortion or contraception. That law was spearheaded by Anthony Comstock, a Christian moralist activist and head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Congress passed the law and appointed Comstock as a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service, giving him the power to arrest people for violations. Comstock ultimately became a public laughingstock for his prudishness, and the Supreme Court overturned the law’s restrictions on birth control in 1965. But the rest of the Comstock Act quietly remained on the books—and the lawsuit over mifepristone is likely to put Comstock’s antiabortion policies back on the Supreme Court’s docket.
Science journalist and author Annalee Newitz spent years researching and interviewing people about the Comstock Act and Comstock himself for their 2019 novel The Future of Another Timeline, in which characters time travel to try to prevent Comstock from getting his law passed. Scientific American spoke with Newitz about what history their research uncovered and how a 150-year-old obscenity law is being used to restrict abortion and reproductive rights in the 21st century.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Who was Anthony Comstock, and how did the Comstock Act come about?
Anthony Comstock was a very famous moral crusader based in New York [City] in the mid-19th century. His career started mostly because he was interested in stamping out obscenity—and by obscenity he meant any imagery [or literature] that contained nudity. He was extreme for his time, but at a certain point, he managed to connect with the New York City YMCA, which was also against what they were referring to as “obscenity.” By connecting with them, he got access to a lot of powerful New Yorkers who were able to fund his campaign. He got himself a position as a special inspector at the postal service. Much of the Comstock Act’s power comes from the ability to regulate communications across state lines.
The law forbids the sending of obscene materials through the mail. Comstock was enforcing the law by ordering thousands of items through the mail, from contraceptives and sex toys to erotic images and abortifacients [substances that end a pregnancy]. Then, after receiving the items, he would prosecute the people sending them. He was targeting people who were known to be selling the raw material but also, more importantly, people who were selling any kind of information that was education-related, not obscene—literally things like “Here’s how to make a baby” and also information about birth control and abortion. The Comstock Act was actually a First Amendment exemption law. It was a law about obscenity: what could be said and what could be passed through the mail. Under that, any information or material related to reproductive health or abortion or sex education was classified as obscene.
That is a very different model from how, in the contemporary world, we understand abortion—because abortion was kind of precariously made semi-legal in the 1970s under the Fourth Amendment, under privacy laws. So basically, to the extent that we started bringing the Comstock laws [a set of laws including and related to the Comstock Act] back, they do a complete end-run around any of the laws that we’ve made since that time to protect people’s ability to have abortions—because it’s not about privacy; it’s about obscenity.
In the early 20th century there was a meme that was started by the playwright George Bernard Shaw, who wrote an op-ed in the New York Times making fun of Comstock—because by the late 19th century, even though the laws were in effect, many modern young people thought that he was an idiot. These included people reading presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull's popular newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, which Comstock continually tried to shut down. George Bernard Shaw said America was suffering from “Comstockery.” He was using this term to refer to the censorship and puritanical nature of American art, and it became a meme. People started using ‘Comstockery’ to make fun of any kind of art or storytelling or writing or politics that was old-fashioned and puritanical.
How have the Comstock Act and related laws evolved over time?
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The Comstock laws were being actively used basically up through the 1960s, which is shocking. And in the 1970s we see on the Supreme Court a revolution in our understanding of what obscenity is and a kind of rejiggering of the First Amendment—because, remember, obscenity is an exemption to the First Amendment. In the early 20th century, this idea of Comstockery becomes really popular. The laws are viewed as old-fashioned. And they’re not really taken off the books, but they’re mostly ignored. And at the same time, courts are using them to continue limiting, especially, abortifacients, abortion information and reproductive health information.
In the 1930s there were some rulings around the Comstock Act that broadened its application to different kinds of birth control but at the same time limited how the law could be used if people were sending abortifacients for unlawful uses. So in the 1930s there’s this limit where it only counts under the Comstock Act if you deliberately are sending somebody something [to illegally abort a pregnancy]. Then, in the 1950s, there’s an expansion of the Comstock Act to include any substance that could lead to an abortion.
Then you get this shift in the early 1970s around privacy law, and reproductive health is placed under privacy. Pretty much every lawyer I’ve ever talked to about this who’s super knowledgeable about reproductive rights is like, Why did we do that? That was such a precarious ruling—so easy to roll back, as we’ve seen [with last year’s Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade]. But it seemed like a good idea at the time. But in the process, of course, that meant that these Comstock laws remained on the books in a lot of places.
In The Future of Another Timeline, characters travel back in time to try to prevent the Comstock laws. When you wrote the book, did you expect these laws would be used in a ruling like the recent mifepristone case?
Definitely not. I’m probably the only person who has written a time travel story about trying to defeat Comstock, although I’d love to be wrong about that. But there are a lot of folks who are law experts and obscenity experts, whose work I read over the years, who have said the laws that protect people’s rights to have an abortion and people’s rights to have access to birth control are super precarious—and what we really need to do is have a law that says abortion is legal and birth control is legal. But what we keep doing because of our Comstockery as a nation is saying, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to give people rights to have an abortion. Why don’t we just say that they have a right to do whatever they want in private, and then we’ll just avoid talking about the issue?” And what that means is that we continue to allow women to become second-class citizens whenever the fuck we want.
How did Comstock use the courts and other means to enforce his agenda?
In the 19th century, Comstock was like, I'm going to use ... surveillance, and I’ll use this brand-new position in the postal service [to police what he called obscenity]. He also had kind of an army of deputized suppressors of vice—he ran this organization called the New York Society for Suppression of Vice, which just sounds like something out of a Marvel comic. And they would do these arrests all the time. So it feels very much like, yes, it comes out of using the courts. But it also comes out of abusing police power because these were people who were, like, pseudo police officers, and they would figure out who was an abortion provider. Comstock once reported breaking into the house of someone who was performing an abortion and dragging him and the patient to the police station to make a point. He described the woman as 'very sick' when she arrived at the police station, which made me imagine that she was literally bleeding on the floor.
It’s all tied up with a lot of the same issues that we’re grappling with nowadays: What kinds of books should we allow children to read? What should police powers be? What is the role of courts? But you know, it’s funny, because now that they’re picking on mifepristone, I think we’re going to get a really funny backlash from an unexpected source, perhaps—which is the pharmaceutical industry. That’ll be interesting to see play out because I think that the pharmaceutical industry sees that, “oh, we know where this is going.” Like, “This is going to go after our bottom line.” I could easily see a judge saying, “We shouldn’t be sending Viagra [by mail] because it’s not for reproduction.”
We might get a similar situation to what Comstock faced in the 19th century, when he was really trying to prevent abortions and sex education. But because he went after art that contained nudity, he ended up pissing off a lot of people who were very powerful, who thought he was suppressing free expression and innocent expressions of intellectual curiosity.
What happened to Comstock himself?
He was basically laughed out of his positions of power. By the time he died, he really was considered to be just a joke. Right after he dies is when Margaret Sanger starts founding her clinics, which eventually become Planned Parenthood. So even that aspect of his work is kind of crushed under the wheels of this new era of family planning.
Given that the Comstock laws are being used to go after the distribution of abortion medication, could they also be used to go after contraception?
Yeah, I mean, I think that’s exactly why drug companies are sitting up and taking notice and sending briefs. This is now an attack on science. So they’re using abortifacients as an excuse to attack a broad range of medical interventions. [Editor’s Note: Congress repealed the parts of the Comstock Act dealing with contraceptives in 1971.]
If you were going back in time to rewrite your book, how would you write the next chapter in this story?
When I was working on the book, I was thinking about how Comstock’s strategy has continued into the present. But a big part of my book is about strategies of resistance and hope and how, in fact, Comstock was defeated pretty soundly. Not only were his laws ignored [after a series of Supreme Court decisions strictly limiting their application], but also he was a laughingstock. The way that happened was that very different groups of people came together. In my book, I show that the wealthy elite of New York had common cause with these marginalized women who were at the Chicago World’s Fair performing belly dances. And this is all based on a true story: Comstock tried to shut down one of the exhibits in the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair because they were putting on belly dancers, and he thought belly dancing was obscene. These are not groups that normally hang out together, but they did come together.
I think that’s why now it’s really interesting to see the power players who are coming together [to oppose restrictions on abortion]. We are seeing people resisting in the name of feminism and in the name of queer rights…. But then you also have drug companies—super capitalists—coming together with these groups that normally they’re not hanging out with. I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a new kind of resistance that combines powerful capitalists and powerful politicians with marginalized people who are the victims of these Comstock laws. So I think there’s a lot of hope.
