Key to those plans is the Comstock Act, the Nineteenth-century anti-vice legislation 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 “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” supposed for “producing abortion.” Till fairly lately, the Comstock Act was regarded as moot, made irrelevant by a collection of Supreme Court docket selections on the First Modification, contraception and abortion. However it was by no means truly repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies imagine they will use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.
“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor common and the authorized thoughts behind the state’s abortion bounty legislation, told The New York Occasions in February. Mitchell may be very a lot a MAGA insider; he represented Trump within the Supreme Court docket case arising from Colorado’s try and boot the ex-president off the poll as an insurrectionist. As The Occasions 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 “spine” to serve in a second Trump administration.
Mitchell is much from the one Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock again from the useless. The 2025 Presidential Transition Mission, a coalition of main right-wing assume tanks, has printed a 920-page plan for a brand new Trump administration, “Mandate for Leadership.” In it, Gene Hamilton, America First Authorized’s vice chairman and a former Trump Division of Justice official, lays out an agenda for the division to focus on abortion medicine.
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.” (“Mandate for Leadership” additionally says {that a} Trump F.D.A. ought to repeal approval for medicine abortion.)
A resurrected Comstock Act wouldn’t simply cease girls from ordering abortion tablets by the mail. It may additionally forestall medical doctors 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 tablets to girls in states with abortion bans.
