The GOP’s new reproductive rally cry: Party like it’s 1873
The GOP has an arsenal of legal cases in the works designed to achieve their ultimate goal of banning abortion nationwide. Some of these cases, like the mifepristone case, will rely on the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old law that has dangerously been left on the books designed to control our bodies by policing the U.S. Mail.
The Comstock Act, passed in 1873 by a postal inspector, “purports to make it a crime to mail ‘every obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, thing, device, or substance,’ or to mail any ‘thing’ for ‘any indecent or immoral purpose’—vague words that inspired a century of litigation just to determine what concepts like ‘obscenity’ actually mean,” reported Ian Millhiser for Vox. It has been used to ban the mailing of contraceptives, lewd materials, and drugs that induce abortions. Dormant after Roe v. Wade established a federal right to abortion, it is now being revived by anti-abortion groups and conservative states seeking to block the mailing of mifepristone, the pill used in more than half of U.S. abortions.