#comstock act

[thoughtportal]

these "porn" bans are a 21st century Comstock Act. They will and already are being used to block information about repro health and LGBTQ stuff.

[socialjusticefail]

How Anthony Comstock became America’s most powerful censor

This year, the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary.

FIRE posted this piece about Anthony Comstock who led to some things not being allowed to be in mail.

[randomperson54321]

Fight for the future - Stop surveilling our mail, stop the Comstock Act!

The Trump administration wants to create a backdoor federal abortion ban by weaponizing the Comstock Act—an archaic, 150-year old federal law that could be used to restrict the mailing of abortion pills.1 This ban would mean that people across the United States will be denied their rights to abortion, even in states where it remains legal. Send a message to your legislators and demand that they support the Stop Comstock Act,2 and we’ll make sure your message reaches key lawmakers.

TAKE ACTION

The Comstock Act is an 1800s sexual purity law that bans the mailing, shipping, and delivery of anything deemed “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile,” originally adopted to restrict the mailing of pornography, contraceptives, and information about abortions.3 The Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade rendered the abortion restrictions under the Comstock Act irrelevant. But with Roe overturned4 and Trump’s increasingly fascist administration in power, Republican strategists and anti-abortion advocates are now pushing5 to use this outdated law for a backdoor federal abortion ban, particularly targeting medication abortion.6

Terrifyingly, the vague provisions of the Comstock Act could also be broadly interpreted to ban the shipping or mailing of other related items such as morning-after pills,7 medical equipment used in abortion care, and even educational/informational materials on abortion care and sexual health.8 It's essentially a tool the federal government can use to surveil and censor everyone’s mail, to ban anything it deems inappropriate or “obscene.” That makes this everyone’s fight. Take action by sending this simple message to your legislators: I urge you to support the Stop Comstock Act and take a stand against censorship and attacks on reproductive rights.

SIGN THE PETITION

Thank you for lending a hand in this important fight.

In solidarity,

Alex at Fight for the Future

Footnotes

1. The Comstock Act - 18 U.S. Code § 1461/1462 - 18 U.S. Code § 1461 - Mailing obscene or crime-inciting matter | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute

2. Stop Comstock Act - H.R. 8796 (118TH cONGRESS, 2D Session) - BILLS-118hr8796ih.pdf

3. Reuters - Kansas votes to preserve abortion rights in first post-Roe v. Wade election test | Reuters

4. TIME - https://time.com/6172956/consequences-overruling-roe-wade/

5. Project 2025 - 2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-14.pdf

6. Guttmacher Institute - https://www.guttmacher.org/2024/03/medication-abortion-accounted-63-all-us-abortions-2023-increase-53-2020

7. NPR - https://www.npr.org/2024/04/10/1243802678/abortion-comstock-act

8. Stop Comstock Act Explainer - https://ciosenus.app.box.com/s/lukg6iugfejff7lh3kvth7dkh5mdncuk

[yeahiwasintheshit]

If trump is elected he will use the Comstock Act to federally ban abortion nation wide immediately.

Listen to this very good summary of what the comstock act is and how and why if trump wins next week, abortion will be outlawed federally nationwide by spring time, without congress even getting involved, and even if your state has protections for abortion already.

[coochiequeens]

Vance said the following at the anti-abortion March for Life in January: “I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

Is Vance willing to help the economy so young people can be eager to start a family? Or is he going to be OK with. Or more money being spent of foster care because the potential adoptive parents from even 10 years ago are now sinking their hopes (and money) into IVF and surrogacy to have biological offspring

CEO of Crisis Pregnancy Center Urges Trump Admin to Ban Abortion Pills Over 'Baby Shortage'

The head of a chain called CompassCare implored AG Pam Bondi to enforce the Comstock Act so people will have more children.

By Susan Rinkunas  |  March 4, 2025 |

It’s no secret that conservatives want to ban abortion pills or make them so much harder to obtain that they’re effectively banned. It’s also no secret that a number of freaks currently running our country are obsessed with everyone popping out babies. What we don’t know at this point is which tactics they’ll use to push their anti-abortion, pro-natalist agenda or how they’ll rationalize further limits on abortion access.

One tool Republicans could use would be misapplying the 19th-century Comstock Act to prevent sending the medications mifepristone and misoprostol in the mail. (Nearly two-thirds of all reported abortions in 2023 were done with abortion pills.) In a January letter, activists urged the Department of Justice to begin enforcing the zombie anti-obscenity law that bans sending abortion drugs or devices in the mail. (The Biden administration said the dusty old law shouldn’t be applied to legal abortions, but they’re not in office anymore.) In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi raised alarm bells when she told a Louisiana prosecutor she “would love to work with [him]” on a criminal case against a New York doctor who allegedly mailed abortion pills to a woman and her teen daughter. Bondi could be signaling that she’s open to prosecuting the physician under Comstock, but we have to wait to find out.

This week, one anti-abortion activist implored Bondi to enforce Comstock and gave two rationalizations: One, it could possibly bankrupt abortion providers and, two, it could maybe help with the country’s declining birth rate. 

Rev. Jim Harden, the CEO of a crisis pregnancy center chain called CompassCare, said in a Monday interview with an apparent right-wing outlet called Just the News that Planned Parenthood is the single largest provider of abortions and gets millions of dollars from the government from programs like Medicaid. “It’s the biggest abortion business, probably on the planet,” Harden said. “If they shut down, it’s going to be good for women. There’s so many fantastic pro-life pregnancy centers.”

Harden then not-so-subtly hinted that Bondi could achieve the GOP goal of “defunding” Planned Parenthood by hitting them with Comstock prosecutions for actions that occurred even before Trump took office a second time.

“If Pam Bondi decides that she wants to enforce the Comstock Act, which basically says it’s illegal to ship chemical abortion drugs across state lines—and by the way, that’s 60% of all abortions in America right now is chemical abortion—the Comstock Act would essentially bankrupt the abortion industry in a very short period of time, because one violation is [up to] a $250,000 fine with a five-year statute of limitations, plus racketing charges,” he said.

But it got worse. He then claimed that abortion was “decimating minority communities” and that conservatives needed to focus more on women and children, specifically, making the former produce more of the latter. “Our country is facing a baby shortage,” Harden said. “We have a fertility problem in this country, not because women can’t have babies but because abortion is decimating the population.”

This sounds like a dog whistle tuned precisely for the pro-natalist creep ears of shadow president Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance. Musk has 14 children that we know of, and Vance said the following at the anti-abortion March for Life in January: “I want more babies in the United States of America. I want more happy children in our country, and I want beautiful young men and women who are eager to welcome them into the world and eager to raise them.”

Few people make this birthrate argument against abortion pills, but the ones that do sound extremely weird. The Attorneys General of Kansas, Idaho, and Missouri claim in a lawsuit against the Food and Drug Administration that easier access to medication abortion is lowering teen birth rates in their states, which could reduce their population and lead to losing seats in Congress and federal funds. (In June, the Supreme Court said the original plaintiffs in this case weren’t harmed by the FDA’s actions and thereby didn’t have legal standing to sue, but the state AGs marched into a notorious anti-abortion judge’s courtroom and he said they can continue the litigation.)

Abortion is not the reason the birthrate is falling. That would be unchecked capitalism where working people don’t make enough money to feed and clothe children, let alone afford housing big enough for families, and aren’t guaranteed paid leave to recover from birth. Plus, the proliferation of abortion bans has led to more people choosing permanent sterilization rather than risk being forced to carry pregnancies that could kill or disable them and then parent children they don’t want. Food for thought, Pam!

[tomorrowusa]

Opinion | The Man Who Snuffed Out Abortion Rights Is Here to Tell You He Is a Moderate

He landed a major blow against legal abortion during his first term. If given a second, he will land another.

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.

[kandoros]

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.

[tzifron]

Everything Old is New Bad Again:

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.