Key to those plans is the Comstock Act, the Nineteenth-century anti-vice regulation named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested 1000’s, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Handed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of each “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” together with “each article, instrument, substance, drug, medication or factor” meant for “producing abortion.” Till fairly not too long ago, the Comstock Act was considered moot, made irrelevant by a sequence of Supreme Courtroom choices on the First Modification, contraception and abortion. Nevertheless it was by no means really repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies consider they will use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.
“We don’t want a federal ban when we now have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor normal and the authorized thoughts behind the state’s abortion bounty regulation, advised The New York Instances in February. Mitchell may be very a lot a MAGA insider; he represented Trump within the Supreme Courtroom case arising from Colorado’s try and boot the ex-president off the poll as an insurrectionist. As The Instances has reported, Mitchell is on a listing of attorneys vetted by America First Authorized, a nonprofit led by the Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, as having the “backbone” to serve in a second Trump administration.
Mitchell is way from the one Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock again from the useless. The 2025 Presidential Transition Venture, a coalition of main right-wing suppose tanks, has printed a 920-page plan for a brand new Trump administration, “Mandate for Management.” In it, Gene Hamilton, America First Authorized’s vp and a former Trump Division of Justice official, lays out an agenda for the division to focus on abortion treatment.
“Following the Supreme Courtroom’s resolution in Dobbs, there’s now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock. “The Division of Justice within the subsequent conservative administration ought to subsequently announce its intent to implement federal regulation towards suppliers and distributors of such drugs.” (“Mandate for Management” additionally says {that a} Trump F.D.A. ought to repeal approval for treatment abortion.)
A resurrected Comstock Act wouldn’t simply cease girls from ordering abortion drugs via the mail. It may additionally forestall docs and pharmacies from shelling out them, since neither the Postal Service nor specific carriers like UPS and FedEx can be allowed to ship them within the first place. And it will give the Justice Division a rationale for cracking down on the networks that assist present drugs to girls in states with abortion bans.