WASHINGTON — Democratic U.S. Senator for Minnesota Tina Smith announced on Thursday plans to introduce legislation to repeal language in the Comstock Act — the infamous law that was the cornerstone of U.S. censorship of all sexual material from the 1870s until the 1970s — concerning distribution of material related to abortion and sexual health.
Smith did not reveal during her announcement the actual text of her proposed Stop Comstock Act (SCA), which has also been endorsed by other Congress Democrats such as New York Rep. Pat Ryan.
There is some imprecision in the Thursday announcement about whether Smith and her allies plan to repeal all the sex censorship provisions of the Comstock Act and related legislation, or, as she seemed to specify later in the statement, only “language in the Comstock Laws that could be used by an anti-abortion administration to ban the mailing of mifepristone and other drugs used in medication abortions, instruments and equipment used in abortions, and educational material related to sexual health.”
Smith described the Comstock Act as “an arcane 1873 law that Republicans and anti-choice extremists want to misuse to ban abortion nationwide.”
As XBIZ reported, clear and present concern about the Comstock Act spiked this spring as conservative Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas invoked it in oral arguments, echoing the spirit of the Heritage Foundation-led Project 2025’s call for renewing its enforcement.
The Comstock Act, congressional news site The Hill explained in March, “banned the mailing of materials that were deemed ‘obscene, lewd, or lascivious,’ which included things such as contraception, abortion drugs and pornography.”
Legal experts such as University of Michigan professor Leah Litman, the Hill added, “are concerned either Thomas or Alito — or both — could write a Comstock-focused opinion arguing the law is viable. Such an opinion could embolden a future GOP administration and anti-abortion groups to continue pressing forward with plans to enforce the Comstock Act in ways it hasn’t been enforced before.”
“The Comstock Act is a 150-year-old zombie law banning abortion that’s long been relegated to the dustbin of history,” Sen. Smith wrote Thursday. “But extremist Republicans and Trump judges have seized upon the idea of misusing Comstock to bypass Congress and strip women nationwide of their reproductive freedoms. When MAGA Republicans say they intend to use the Comstock Act to control women’s decisions and enact a backdoor national abortion ban, we should believe them. Now that Trump has overturned Roe, a future Republican administration could try to misapply this 150-year-old Comstock law to deny American women their rights, even in states where abortion rights are protected by state law.”
Smith added that “it is too dangerous to leave this law on the books; we cannot allow MAGA judges and politicians to control the lives of American women.”
Her office added that these censorship laws originally “meant to ban the mailing or shipping of every obscene, lewd, indecent, article, matter, thing or device, with the goal of restricting abortion, contraceptives, and even love letters,” and “a future administration hostile to sexual and reproductive health care will willfully misapply these unconstitutionally vague laws to impose a ban on abortion nationwide, even without any Congressional action.”