Anthony Comstock.
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Resurrecting the zombie 1873 Comstock Act- to enact a national prohibition on all abortion-related activity - aka, "An Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use" - is a central component of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 plan for Republican governance, should the fascist GOP prevail in the 2024 elections.
This was the overriding urgent message from a recent Netroots Nation panel in Baltimore I attended: "Zombie Law: The Comstock Act and the Future of Health and Rights."
Panelists U.S. Senator Tina Smith (MN), Sarah Lipton-Lubet (ACLU), and Pamela Merritt
(Medical Students for Choice) resoundingly echoed one another: saying that, under Project 2025, the long-dormant Comstock Act (1873), would be weaponized by a second-term Trump administration Department of Justice (DOJ) to nationalize the current state-based anti-choice Dobbs decision of 2022.
"There is no need for congress to pass new legislation," said Lipton-Lubet, "since it already technically exists in the form of the nineteenth century Comstock Act."
While it hasn't been enforced for decades, both Project 2025 and a multitude of Republicans -- including freshly anointed VP-nominee J.D. Vance -- have demanded that the Department of Justice enforce Comstock, as The Washington Post documented recently in a piece titled, "Vance urged DOJ to enforce Comstock Act, crack down on abortion pills."
At the same time, during the crucial 2024 election season, 'pro-life' groups are being told to stop saying out loud what Vance correctly and quietly says the DOJ can accomplish without a contentious legislative battle: making illegal the mailing or transport of all pills, equipment, and contraceptive supplies in support of reproductive care, miscarriage management, and abortion provision.
The crises in maternal healthcare, from schools to clinics to interns to nurses to doctors, is already here. And it extends to HIV prevention, clean needle exchange, and gender-affirming care, in the form of supply shortages, politicized hospital board decisions, unhealthy staff-to-patient nursing ratios, mental health trauma, professional morale, early retirements, relocations, workplace bullying, and more.
Intensifying that reality, the June 2022 U.S. Supreme Court Dobbs 'reverse-precedent' decision overturning Roe - an extremist finding that has triggered total abortion bans in 14 states, caused six-week prohibitions in three more states, produced more limited interdictions in several more states - and we have a perfect storm for the fascist GOP dream of a modern Handmaid's Tale.
Look no further than the Comstock model of Texas to see how close we are to the dystopian-misogynist national vision of Project 2025. Ringing the bell for lost bodily autonomy, Jonathan Mitchell, the architect of Texas' "bounty hunter" law and one of Trump's personal lawyers declared: "We don't need a federal [abortion] ban when we have Comstock on the books."
To wit, The Guardian's 11 August 2024 piece, "Child Rape Survivors Face Extraordinary Barriers in States with Abortion Bans" documents in graphic terms the horrors endured by two sisters at the hands of their stepfather and his friends. "We both had STDs because none of them used condoms," confided the first of the child victims. After fleeing to a domestic violence shelter upon discovering they were pregnant, they fortunately found abortion pills through an underground network of activists. "If I couldn't have an abortion, I would have killed myself," shared the same child. "The man who raped me was a pig, and I did not want to have his baby inside of me."
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