Donald Trump is talking out of either side of his mouth on abortion.
On the one hand, Trump often claims credit score for the Supreme Court docket’s resolution eliminating the constitutional proper to an abortion — and effectively he ought to, because the three Republicans he appointed to the Supreme Court docket all joined the Court docket’s 2022 resolution allowing abortion bans. As Trump instructed Fox Information final summer season, “I did one thing that nobody thought was potential. I removed Roe v. Wade.”
On the identical time, Trump not less than claims that he has no curiosity in signing new federal laws banning abortion. When a reporter requested Trump if he would signal such a ban final month, Trump’s reply was an specific “no.”
Behind the scenes, nevertheless, lots of Trump’s closest allies tout a plan to ban abortion in all 50 states that doesn’t require any new federal laws by any means. The linchpin of this plan is the Comstock Act, a long-defunct, 1873 regulation that, amongst different issues, purports to ban “any drug, drugs, article, or factor designed, tailored, or supposed for producing abortion” from being mailed or in any other case transported by an “categorical firm” corresponding to UPS or FedEx.
Anybody who violates this regulation faces as much as 5 years in jail — and the utmost sentence doubles for repeat offenders. Thus, anybody who delivers an abortion medicine, or any machine utilized in a surgical abortion, might doubtlessly face such extraordinary sanctions that the transit of such items would shut down.
Lots of the main proponents of utilizing Comstock to ban all abortions, furthermore, are more likely to be very influential inside a second Trump administration, if such a factor happens. The Heritage Basis’s Challenge 2025, for instance, touts implementing Comstock to ban abortion medicine in its 920-page mega-white paper outlining insurance policies for Trump.
Equally, Jonathan Mitchell, one in every of Trump’s private legal professionals and the architect of a Texas regulation that enables nearly anybody to gather bounties from abortion suppliers, bragged to the New York Occasions that “we don’t want a federal ban when we’ve got Comstock on the books.”
There are very robust authorized arguments that Comstock can’t really be used to successfully ban abortion, not less than in locations the place abortion is authorized. The regulation has not been critically enforced for practically a century, and an extended line of court docket choices stretching again to not less than 1915 have learn the Comstock Act narrowly to stop it from getting used as a common ban on all abortions.
Nonetheless, these precedents are solely significant if the Supreme Court docket chooses to observe them, and betting on the identical justices who overruled Roe to honor earlier pro-abortion choices is at all times a harmful wager. It is going to get much more harmful if Trump will get to nominate extra justices.
And, even when the Court docket in the end determined to observe previous choices studying Comstock narrowly, months or years would doubtless go between the Trump Justice Division’s resolution to file felony costs underneath the Comstock Act, and a Supreme Court docket resolution halting that prosecution. Within the interim, few, if any, distributors of medicines and medical provides are more likely to danger transport something that would result in themselves being prosecuted.
So, whereas there’s a honest quantity of uncertainty about whether or not a second Trump administration might completely shut down all authorized abortions in the US by implementing the Comstock Act, it’s doubtless that, on the very least, a Trump Justice Division might shut down abortion look after months and even years whereas the courts had been checking out what to do with Comstock prosecutions.
So the place does the Comstock Act come from?
The Comstock Act is a relic, not simply of a extra prudish period in American historical past, however of an age when the type of particular person rights that fashionable Individuals take without any consideration successfully didn’t exist.
A lot of the regulation is unconstitutionally obscure. It purports to make it a criminal offense to mail “each obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article, matter, factor, machine, or substance,” for “any indecent or immoral objective.” Comstock and related legal guidelines impressed a century of litigation simply to find out what the phrase “obscene” means, and it’s anybody’s guess which gadgets are “lewd,” “filthy,” or “vile.”
Equally, the regulation imposes a strict censorship code, focusing on any “writing” that can be utilized “for any indecent or immoral objective” — a provision that violates any believable understanding of the First Modification proper to free speech.
The Comstock Act’s namesake is Anthony Comstock, a Nineteenth-century anti-vice crusader who wielded it and related state legal guidelines towards artists, authors, and reproductive well being suppliers as indiscriminately as he wielded it towards precise pornographers. Comstock as soon as efficiently introduced felony costs towards an artwork gallery proprietor for promoting reproductions of well-known nude work. He additionally bragged, after a girl he arrested for promoting contraceptive capsules died by suicide, that she was the fifteenth particular person focused by one in every of his investigations to take her personal life.
The censorious values that produced the Comstock Act, in different phrases, are fairly alien to most modern-day Individuals. The regulation stems from an period when girls couldn’t vote, when reproductive well being care was far cruder and fewer dependable than it’s at the moment, and when Congress thought it was a good suggestion to ban books and tremendous artwork.
Would at the moment’s courts really enable Comstock to be enforced towards abortion suppliers?
A 2022 memo by the Justice Division’s Workplace of Authorized Counsel lays out the very robust case for studying the Comstock Act narrowly. This memo argues that the regulation doesn’t prohibit mailing or in any other case transporting abortion medicines “the place the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the medicine will use them unlawfully.”
Thus, underneath the present Justice Division’s studying of the regulation, abortion-related supplies should be shipped to states the place abortion is authorized. They could even be shipped if the sender is unaware that the recipient intends to make use of the merchandise for an unlawful objective.
Because the memo notes, federal appeals courts have held for greater than a century that the Comstock Act shouldn’t be learn as a common ban on transport any abortion-related merchandise. In Bours v. United States (1915), for instance, the US Court docket of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held that the regulation have to be given a “cheap development” to allow physicians to promote within the mail that they’ll carry out a lifesaving abortion.
Later choices learn the regulation much more narrowly. One of many seminal court docket choices deciphering the Comstock Act, the hilariously named Second Circuit resolution in United States v. One Package deal of Japanese Pessaries (1936), held that the regulation solely applies when somebody ships an merchandise intending it for use for an unlawful objective.
The Comstock Act, One Package deal concluded, “was to not forestall the importation, sale, or carriage by mail of issues which could intelligently be employed by conscientious and competent physicians for the aim of saving life or selling the effectively being of their sufferers.” Accordingly, the court docket dominated that the statute should solely be learn to focus on “illegal” exercise.
Although the Supreme Court docket by no means explicitly embraced the reasoning of Bours or One Package deal, that’s more than likely as a result of the Court docket’s constitutional choices rendered the Comstock Act irrelevant for a lot of a long time. The Court docket’s choices in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) and Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) established a constitutional proper to contraception, thus stopping Comstock from getting used to focus on contraception. And Roe, in fact, till very lately prevented the federal government from banning abortion.
However, there are highly effective authorized arguments supporting the proposition that instances like One Package deal stay good regulation at the moment and may forestall practically any prosecution underneath the Comstock Act. Because the Justice Division notes in its memo, the Postal Service “accepted the courts’ narrowing development of the Act in administrative rulings, and it knowledgeable Congress of the company’s acceptance of that development” when Congress amended the regulation after Griswold to largely take away its provisions focusing on contraception.
Ordinarily, when Congress amends a regulation that has been constantly interpreted in a selected manner by the courts, Congress is known to ratify the courts’ studying of that regulation. Because the Supreme Court docket held in Texas Division of Housing and Group Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Challenge (2015), “if a phrase or phrase has been … given a uniform interpretation by inferior courts … a later model of that act perpetuating the wording is presumed to hold ahead that interpretation.”
Many states, in the meantime, apply a doctrine referred to as “desuetude” to felony legal guidelines that stay on the books, however that haven’t really been used for a really very long time. Because the West Virginia Supreme Court docket mentioned in a 1992 opinion, “a regulation prohibiting some act that has not given rise to an actual prosecution in 20 years is unfair to the one particular person selectively prosecuted underneath it.”
That mentioned, this identical West Virginia opinion additionally warned that the desuetude doctrine doesn’t embody significantly reprehensible acts — “if nobody had been prosecuted underneath an obscure statute prohibiting ax murders since Lizzie Borden was acquitted, we’d nonetheless enable prosecution underneath that statute at the moment” — so even when the US Supreme Court docket had been inclined to embrace this doctrine, the Republican-controlled Court docket may look upon abortion as morally much like homicide.
In the end, in different phrases, the destiny of a Comstock prosecution isn’t more likely to relaxation upon whether or not Congress ratified One Package deal, or on whether or not there may be authorized assist for the proposition that long-defunct felony legal guidelines stop to operate. The Supreme Court docket is made up of political appointees, a few of whom are fairly keen to disregard the regulation to realize partisan targets, and the one approach to positively shut down Comstock prosecutions is to persuade a majority of the justices to take action.
Many Republican judges, in the meantime, have been fairly keen to revive long-dead abortion bans now that Roe is now not round. Simply final month, for instance, Arizona’s Supreme Court docket reinstated a Civil Battle period ban on abortions — though the state legislature rapidly moved to repeal that ban.
All of which is a good distance of claiming that the present standing of the Comstock Act is extremely unsure, and can rely on who sits on the Supreme Court docket if and when the Justice Division decides to convey a prosecution underneath this regulation. And, even within the best-case situation, if a future Justice Division is keen to take action, the mere risk of a Comstock prosecution is more likely to shut down entry to abortion capsules (and doubtlessly to surgical tools used to carry out abortions) all through the nation.
