Opinion: This law from the 1870s could imperil abortion in blue states
Since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in June, promising strategies have emerged to protect abortion rights in individual states. Some have begun to pass ballot initiatives to preserve or create state constitutional protection. Others have looked to legislatures to shield doctors and those who help people seeking abortion from potential consequences in conservative states.
These wins are hardly a silver bullet: not all states allow ballot initiatives and there are any number of states where majorities of voters seem to support abortion rights but are governed by legislators who want to ban the procedure—a result of deep partisan divides, gerrymandering and limits on access to the vote.
Just the same, supporters of abortion rights have made the most of the best strategies available to them, bolstered by the fact that most Americans support at least some access to legal abortion.
This is, in part, why antiabortion groups have gotten creative and developed new strategies to cut off access to abortion, even in states where voting majorities have already chosen to guarantee it. An obvious target is abortion pills, which now account for more than half the procedures in the United States.
But the latest approach by abortion opponents to disrupt access in blue states is an archaic law: the Comstock Act, passed in 1873 mainly to target what Anthony Comstock, an anti-vice crusader, viewed as dirty books. Comstock, who was made a special agent of the US Postal Service, was obsessed by what he saw as the decaying morals of a country preoccupied with sex.
The law he inspired barred not just the mailing of "obscene books" but also birth control and abortion drugs and devices. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Comstock Act was used to prohibit the mailing of many literary classics, from Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" to works by James Joyce and Walt Whitman.
https://www.kake.com/story/48246951/opinion-this-law-from-the-1870s-could-imperil-abortion-in-blue-states
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