August 11, 2026:

Major anti-abortion groups are calling on the Trump administration to enforce the Comstock Act, a dormant 19th-century law that conservatives have long seen as a backdoor avenue to ban the mailing of abortion pills across the country—if not outlaw abortion entirely. 

Nearly three dozen right-wing groups—including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life of America, and Men for Life (so glad the men are getting involved)—asked newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche in an Aug. 7 letter to have the Department of Justice enforce the 1873 law. The Comstock Act says, in part, that no one can “knowingly use the mail to send, and the U.S. Postal Service may not deliver, any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” 

The Comstock Act is named for Anthony Comstock, a Victorian-era moral crusader who convinced Congress in 1873 to ban “lewd” and “obscene” materials from the mail—a category that, for the prudish Mr. Comstock, included not just pornography, but also contraceptives, abortion information, and even medical textbooks with illustrations of human anatomy.

The Comstock Act has lain dormant for decades. But conservatives, emboldened by Blanche’s private anti-abortion pledge to faith leaders, are now trying to dust off this old law. Their plan? To weaponize it to restrict bodily autonomy and continue their attacks on abortion rights.

Using Comstock, conservatives could effectively ban abortion nationwide without passing a single new law. But here’s the thing: The Comstock Act was never intended to prosecute people who were providing lawful abortions.

Yes, Anthony Comstock was a zealot who wanted to rid the world of porn, contraceptives, and anything remotely sexual because he believed any sex outside of marriage was deviant. (It makes you wonder why he was known for collecting and displaying the sex toys he confiscated from people. Yes, Comstock was a dildo hoarder.) And yes, his law was broadly enforced in the late-19th and early-20th centuries to go after everything from contraception to famous works of art. 

But his law was written to achieve social purity—not jail doctors for providing lawful abortions.

That doesn’t matter. Conservatives hope to dust off this zombie law and use it to de facto ban abortion in the United States. And now that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has also ordered a review of mifepristone, one of two drugs used in medication abortions, SBA Pro-Life America’s letter comes at a particularly threatening time.

Weaponizing the Comstock Act

A conservative plan to weaponize the Comstock Act to eliminate medication abortion as an option for pregnant patients isn’t a figment of my paranoid imagination. The policy is laid out in Project 2025. 

The Heritage Foundation’s 900-page blueprint for turning the U.S. into a theocratic cult declares that “abortion pills pose the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world” before calling for the next conservative administration’s Department of Justice to “announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”

The plan hasn’t materialized as quickly as I figured it would. I thought reviving Comstock was going to be one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first projects. Little did I know that kidnapping people off the streets and sending them to gulags in El Salvador or the alligator-infested swamps of Florida was going to become the Trump administration’s prime obsession.

Yet the Comstock Act is still there, hovering like a sword of Damocles over the heads of women and other people who can become pregnant. And a new Trump administration hire suggests that it is gearing up to start the next stage of its assault on U.S. democracy by cracking down on abortion.

Courts have long ruled that items must be mailed with the intent for unlawful use for the Comstock Act to apply. For example, in 1930, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case called Youngs Rubber Corp. v. C.I. Lee & Co—yes, that’s really the name—ruled that the maker of Trojan condoms had not violated the Comstock Act by sending condoms or advertisements for them through the mail. 

Six years later in United States v. One Package (I know, the jokes write themselves), the Second Circuit ruled that Comstock should not be interpreted to apply to shipments of diaphragms made to licensed physicians for legitimate medical use.

But the Trump administration is not beholden to the 2022 interpretation of the Comstock Act and could easily rebrand this 19th-century anti-vice law into, as law professor and abortion rights scholar Mary Ziegler termed it, “a nationwide abortion trafficking law.” And it’s not just the U.S. Postal Service—the Comstock rules apply to FedEx, UPS, and other private mail carriers, too.

This goes beyond abortion pills. Conservatives could wield the Comstock Act to reduce access to procedural abortions, contraception, or anything used for “immoral or indecent purposes,” a perfectly vague term that can be interpreted to incorporate all sorts of behavior—from mailing IUDs and condoms, to distributing LGBTQ-inclusive sex education materials.

After the Supreme Court legalized contraception for married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, Congress removed the references to contraception from the Comstock laws in 1971. But could the Trump administration deem contraception to be “immoral” or “indecent” and then proceed to ban it? Absolutely. HIV medication, gender-affirming care, sexual health supplies—even lingerie or sex toys—could all be banned, too, should the Trump DOJ decide they’re “immoral.”

A single memo from the Department of Justice declaring enforcement of the Comstock Act could wipe entire categories of health care off the map.

In 2025, Colorado Sen. John B. Hickenlooper foresaw this scenario and called for the Comstock Act to be repealed. 

In describing the need for the failed Senate legislation he sponsored to prevent a misuse of Comstock, Hickenlooper said in July 2025, “They’re just taking a law that was intended for one thing and using it for another. So we just strip that language, make that interpretation impossible.”

“We already have heard that medication abortion is in the crosshairs of the current leadership,” Hickenlooper said. “We’re not sure how that’s going to manifest itself, but these extreme Republicans and laws from 1873 should not be directing a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, period.”

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 16, 2025.

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