Democratic senator eyeing bill to repeal Comstock Act

Congressional Democrats are strategizing over a bill that would repeal the Comstock Act, Section 19.^th The anti-vice law is attracting attention from conservative activists who believe it could lead to a nationwide ban on abortion.

Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said in a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday that she wants to introduce legislation that would “repeal the Comstock Act as a means of restricting reproductive freedom.”

Smith said he is talking with Democrats in the House and Senate to drum up support for a potential bill, but talks are only in the early stages and no bill was expected to be introduced.

“Legislation to repeal Comstock could take many forms, but we need to do it the right way,” Smith wrote.

In the House, Rep. Cori Bush (D-Missouri) also called for the law to be repealed, calling it a “dead law that the far right is trying to revive” in a post about X.

Although a Comstock repeal bill is unlikely to pass significantly in the current divided Congress, Democrats are working hard to make abortion an election-year issue.

The 151-year-old law specifically prohibits the shipment of “any article or article designed, modified, or intended to cause an abortion.”

Anti-abortion groups say the Biden administration violated the law by allowing the abortion drug mifepristone to be mailed.

During Supreme Court oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the move and other administration efforts to expand access to mifepristone, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito repeatedly invoked the Comstock Act. did.

The law was unenforceable while Roe v. Wade was ongoing, and has not been applied for nearly a century. But now that Roe has been overturned, anti-abortion activists see an opportunity.

These activists are working with former Trump administration officials to ensure that the incoming Republican administration implements the Comstock Act, which bans the mailing of abortion pills and materials, effectively banning all abortions without the need for Congressional intervention. We are building the foundation to do so.

The last time Democrats introduced legislation related to the Comstock Act was in 1997, when former Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts led the Comstock Cleanup Act of 1997, which repealed the abortion provision. The bill never moved forward.

Abortion rights groups were reluctant to pursue Comstock legislation before the Supreme Court decided the mifepristone case. Smith indicated the bill would not become law until a decision is made later this summer.

“Once the Supreme Court has had its say, and many legal analysts are speculating that the mifepristone case heard last week should be thrown out on procedural grounds, it probably could be. “I am ready to give my opinion,” she wrote.