A group of women Democratic senators introduced a repeal of the 1873 Comstock Act Thursday, citing the threat of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a blueprint for the next Republican president. This archaic law needs to go, and talking about it—and the GOP’s plans—is an excellent way to get the word out to voters about Republicans’ radical agenda.
The Comstock Act banned the mailing of contraceptives, “lewd” writings, and any “instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” that could be used in an abortion. It’s been more or less superseded by the Supreme Court and new laws in the past century and a half, but it remains on the books. Like a dormant volcano, it sits waiting for a shift in the political ground to erupt.
Patty Murray of Washington, one of the co-sponsors, talked about the threat in a press conference Tuesday.
“Donald Trump and his allies are planning a detailed road map, they’ve given it out, to rip away a woman’s right to choose in every single state in America,” she said.
Lead sponsor of the bill, Tina Smith of Minnesota, told The Washington Post that there is “a very clear, well-organized plan afoot by the MAGA Republicans to use Comstock as a tool to ban medication abortion, and potentially all abortions.”
“My job is to take that tool away,” Smith added.
The shift was presaged by the focus of Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in their arguments in Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, in which the court unanimously preserved access to the abortion pill. The ruling wasn’t on the merits of the FDA’s decision to expand access to the drug, but rather on a technicality of whether the physicians’ group bringing the challenge could sufficiently claim that they were harmed by it.
In that case, Thomas and Alito all but told future plaintiffs how to bring back this challenge: by invoking the Comstock Act. They specifically asked the attorneys arguing the case of the FDA’s pandemic-era decision—made permanent in 2023—to use the Comstock Act in their challenges.
Project 2025, in addition to mapping out a fascist autocratic agenda for Republicans in just about every aspect of U.S. government and life, has a long and specific focus on curtailing reproductive rights. Using the Comstock Act is a prominent part of the agenda.
One of the architects of the blueprint, Jonathan F. Mitchell, made that clear in an interview with The New York Times.
“We don’t need a federal ban [on abortion] when we have Comstock on the books,” he said.
That’s not to say that Republicans won’t ban abortion nationally if they sweep the Congress and White House, making it all the more important for Democrats to show voters precisely what’s at stake this election cycle.
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