The antiabortion movement is relying 'on a long-discredited 1873 law to eviscerate women’s healthcare rights in the modern age.' Columnist hiltzikm explains:
Nothing reflects that show-stopping lyric “everything old is new again” like the tactics of the antiabortion movement — specifically, its reliance on a long-discredited 1873 law to eviscerate women’s healthcare rights in the modern age.
There are indications that antiabortion activists, if they prevail in this case, might try to exploit the Comstock Act to interfere with the shipment not only of mifepristone but of any drugs, equipment or paraphernalia that could be used for abortions. As an anti-obscenity crusader, Comstock had the backing of wealthy patrons. They included Morris K. Jesup, a banker and philanthropist best known as a founder of the American Museum of Natural History, but who also co-founded the Committee for the Suppression of Vice, which Comstock chaired.Trump-appointed judges in Texas are stripping all Americans of their rights to healthcare and safety. At last, the Biden administration is pushing back.
The case, however, made Comstock’s name synonymous with “prudery, Puritanism and officious meddling,” according to Broun and Leech. Proving the adage that no publicity is bad publicity, Comstock would ride his renown to greater fame. Anti-obscenity crusader Anthony Comstock, lampooned in a 1915 periodical. The caption read: “Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child.”
The law Congress originally passed referred to “unlawful” abortions, but that qualification disappeared from a restatement of the law in 1948. Looking back on his career just before his death in 1915, Comstock boasted of having “convicted persons enough to fill a passenger train of sixty-one coaches,” and having “destroyed 160 tons of obscene literature.” Among his targets were some volumes deemed classics of European literature even then, including Bocaccio’s “Decameron.”
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