Comstock Act

‘Comstocked’: How Extremists Are Exploiting a Victorian-Era Law To Deny Abortion Access

In June 2019, the all-male city council in Waskom, Texas, unanimously voted to make the tiny town of just 2,000 residents the nation’s first “sanctuary city for the unborn.” Characterizing fetuses as the “most innocent among us [who] deserve equal protection under the law,” the ordinance expressly bans abortion within its municipal boundaries. The man behind the ban, anti-abortion zealot and pastor Mark Lee Dickson, has since expanded his campaign to outlaw abortion “one city at a time” into at least six other states.

(This article originally appears in the Fall 2023 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)

Today in Feminist History: Griswold v. Connecticut is a Win for Both Privacy and Contraception (June 7, 1965)

Ninety-two years after the war on birth control began when Congress passed the Comstock Act, declaring contraceptive devices and information about them to be obscene, un-mailable articles, and states soon enacted their own total bans, Connecticut’s 1879 statute outlawing birth control has been declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (381 U.S. 479).