More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In 1873, the Comstock Act banned sending obscene literature, abortifacients, contraceptives or sexual information through the U.S. mail system. The language regarding contraception was later removed in 1971 after the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling. Antiabortion advocates have suggested that Comstock Law could be used as a backdoor method of enforcing a national abortion ban by restricting the shipment of abortion drugs as well as medical equipment used in abortions.
“Pills have become the frontline of the battle for abortion access,” writes professor and Ms. contributor editor Carrie N. Baker in her new book Abortion Pills: U.S. History and Politics—the first to offer a comprehensive history of abortion pills in the United States.
Americans are picking their first president after the Supreme Court overturned their constitutional right to an abortion.
Now, two-and-a-half years later, with near-full abortion bans in 13 states, deaths confirmed because of them, and a smattering of states that have enacted protections via the direct democracy of ballot initiatives, the country has a choice: to reelect Republican Donald Trump, whose pledge to undo Roe helped fuel his first ascent to the White House; or to elect Democrat Kamala Harris, who is running on resurrecting abortion rights as she aims to be the first woman to win the presidency.
When it comes to abortion pill availability, the Supreme Court left open a dangerous door that the Republican-controlled states of Missouri, Kansas and Idaho are now seeking to walk through.
Transition documents, the Republican Party platform and policy statements demonstrate that a new Trump administration intends to take actions that would ban or severely restrict abortion access in every state.
Since the fall of Roe, cross-border abortion travel has doubled. To guard against the threat of having—as President Biden put it—the medical records of abortion patients “used against them, their doctor, or their loved one just because they sought or received lawful reproductive healthcare,” a new HIPAA rule issued last year enhances the privacy protections for reproductive healthcare.
Attorneys general from 19 abortion-hostile states submitted a formal letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in opposition to the proposed enhanced privacy rule, based on its disregard for fetal personhood. The AGs failed in their mission to prevent the proposed 2024 rule from becoming final—so Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton took matters into his own hands. The Texas challenge will be heard by Republican appointee Judge James Wesley Hendrix in Lubbock, Texas. It is anticipated that he will be sympathetic to the state’s position.
Project 2025 promotes a presidential agenda that rolls back civil and human rights and implements extremist conservative policies across every federal department and agency. Its sweeping far-right policy framework, by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, includes numerous attacks on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
This fact sheet enumerates some of the agenda’s most serious threats to sexual and reproductive health and describes potential effects.
Project 2025, the far-right blueprint for a second Trump term, proposes replacing comprehensive sex education with government-endorsed fertility tracking programs under the guise of promoting “natural” family planning. This medically unsound initiative is part of a broader effort to control reproductive knowledge and engineer a state-sponsored “baby boom.”
There is much that a potential Harris administration and Congress could do to offset the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs ruling.
Congress could amend existing federal laws—starting with repealing the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal money from being used to fund abortions, or the Comstock Act, a Victorian law which some judges have interpreted as prohibiting the mailing of abortion pills. Congress could also enact legislation that protects the right to interstate abortion travel. Or Harris could ask Congress to pass a law that would guarantee the same kind of access to mifepristone that the FDA currently allows.
Post-Dobbs, “the anti-abortion movement is regrouping around a new goal: using the federal government to ban abortion in the rest of the country,” warns Vox’s Adam Freelander.
This thorough explainer video also features Ms. contributing editor Carrie Baker, Ms. contributor Mary Ziegler, Ian Millhiser, Anna North and Rachel Cohen.
A general consensus seems to have emerged after last week’s oral arguments in the case against the abortion pill that the Supreme Court is likely to rule that the anti-abortion physicians and their umbrella group, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, lack sufficient legal grounds to challenge the FDA’s loosening of restrictions on mifepristone.
While dismissal based on a lack of standing would be a welcome result, it is not a guarantee given the Court’s anti-abortion supermajority. But even if this occurs, the apparent zest manifested by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas towards the Comstock Act from 1873 brings a lurking danger fully out into the open.