The Zombie Law Trump Wants to Use to Ban Abortion Nationwide

Members of the former president’s inner circle are worried that he’ll blab about their plan to gut what remains of our reproductive freedoms.

Melissa Gira Grant
February 20, 2024

Donald Trump’s lawyer really, really hopes that Donald Trump doesn’t blow up their plan to ban abortion nationally by talking about it publicly before the election—at least according to the aforementioned Trump lawyer, speaking to The New York Times. Why Jonathan Mitchell, the conservative attorney from Texas, would boast in a national newspaper about a plan that he also supposedly hopes doesn’t become a campaign issue is unclear. Why he is using an open media channel to muse about what his client may or may not know is equally strange and confusing. But the headline here seems to be “Donald Trump backs a national abortion ban,” though possibly for reasons of which he’s yet to be apprised.

Continued: https://newrepublic.com/article/179137/trump-comstock-national-abortion-ban

‘Comstocked’: How Extremists Are Exploiting a Victorian-Era Law To Deny Abortion Access

The 1873 Comstock law prohibits the conveyance of anything used for “the procuring or producing of abortion.” One man believes it’s the gateway to a national abortion ban that even the bluest of states will not be able to evade.

10/25/2023
by SHOSHANNA EHRLICH

In June 2019, the all-male city council in Waskom, Texas, unanimously voted to make the tiny town of just 2,000 residents the nation’s first “sanctuary city for the unborn.” Characterizing fetuses as the “most innocent among us [who] deserve equal protection under the law,” the ordinance expressly bans abortion within its municipal boundaries. The man behind the ban, anti-abortion zealot and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, has since expanded his campaign to outlaw abortion “one city at a time” into at least six other states.

At first glance, this effort may appear superfluous in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which, in overturning Roe v. Wade, ended federal protection of abortion rights. In response to the decision, a growing number of states have enacted outright abortion bans or highly restrictive laws, while others have doubled down on a commitment to keeping abortion legal and accessible.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/10/25/comstock-abortion-access-sanctuary-cities/

USA – The 150-Year-Old Comstock Act Could Transform the Abortion Debate

Once considered a relic of moral panics past, the 1873 law criminalized sending “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials through the mail

June 15, 2023
Ellen Wexler, Assistant Editor, Humanities, The Smithsonian

“Our youth are in danger.” So read the urgent warning written by anti-vice activist Anthony Comstock in his 1883 book, Traps for the Young.

He cautioned, “Mentally and morally, they are cursed by a literature that is a disgrace to the 19th century. The spirit of evil environs them.”

Continued: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/comstock-act-transform-abortion-debate-180982363/

USA – How a 150-Year-Old Law Against Lewdness Became a Key to the Abortion Fight

The Comstock Act, named for a public-morals crusader on a mission to “sanitize” the U.S. in the 1870s, makes a comeback in the abortion-pill battle.

By Emily Bazelon
May 16, 2023

Anthony Comstock, a 19th-century crusader against sexual liberty, was mocked as a prude in his own time, but wielded real power. He persuaded Congress in 1873 to pass the Comstock Act, written by and named for him, making it a federal crime to send or deliver “obscene, lewd or lascivious” material through the mail or by other carriers, specifically including items used for abortion or birth control.

By the 1960s, the Comstock Act had fallen out of use — narrowed by court rulings, partly gutted by congressional repeals — and it was made an unconstitutional relic by the Supreme Court’s decision in 1973 in Roe v. Wade, recognizing a national right to abortion. But it stayed on the books.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/us/abortion-comstock-act.html

USA – Anti-abortion legal strategy revives Comstock moral purity laws of late 1800s

BY: ELISHA BROWN
APRIL 27, 2023

When officials in a small New Mexico city sued the governor and attorney general over their ordinance placing restrictions on abortion clinics earlier this month, they argued that a late 19th century federal anti-obscenity law superseded state law. In March, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a measure prohibiting public entities from interfering with reproductive and gender-affirming care access.

It was the latest legal challenge to abortion access to lean on the Comstock Act of 1873, federal statutes that ban the mailing of anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious” or considered morally impure, including abortifacients or abortion-related materials.

Continued: https://lailluminator.com/2023/04/27/anti-abortion-legal-strategy-revives-comstock-moral-purity-laws-of-late-1800s/

27.04.2023

Information Society Project

Mark Lee Dickson

Michelle Lujan Grisham

What Did the Suffragists Really Think About Abortion?

Contrary to contemporary claims, Susan B. Anthony and her peers rarely discussed abortion, which only emerged as a key political issue in the 1960s

Treva B. Lindsey
May 26, 2022

In July 1869, an anonymously authored article appeared in the Revolution, a weekly newspaper run by suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Titled “Marriage and Maternity,” the essay deemed abortion a “horrible crime of child-murder,” albeit one practiced not out of malice, but desperation, “by those whose inmost souls revolt against the dreadful deed, and in whose hearts the maternal feeling is pure and undying.”

Signed only with the letter “A,” the article has long been used by anti-abortion advocates as proof of Anthony’s anti-abortion views and of a broader throughline within feminist thought and activism. This claim, however, ignores two key facts: first, that substantial evidence points to the author not even being Anthony, and second, that the essay argues against the criminalization of abortion, calling for “prevention, not merely punishment.”

Continued: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-did-the-suffragists-really-think-about-abortion-180980124/