Anthony Comstock died in 1915. The law he wrote in 1873 is about to be brought back as the federal mechanism to ban abortion pills nationwide — without Congress, without the Supreme Court, without a single new statute. The men running the project have done the legal homework. They have written the memos. They have given the speeches. The vehicle is in place. The decision to turn the key is administrative.
Most Americans have never heard of the Comstock Act. That is by design.
A revival you announce loudly can be opposed. A revival you turn on quietly cannot.
The Law
The Comstock Act of 1873 made it a federal crime to send through the United States mail, or by any common carrier, any material classified as “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy.” The category included contraception, abortion materials, sex-education information, and anything that touched the reproductive or sexual lives of American adults. The Act was pushed through Congress by Anthony Comstock, a Connecticut-born dry-goods salesman turned anti-vice crusader who was simultaneously appointed Special Agent of the United States Postal Service. He prosecuted his own statute for forty years.The Comstock Act is codified at 18 U.S.C. §§ 1461–1462. The statute specifically targets any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
The Comstock Act is still on the books. Title 18, U.S. Code, Sections 1461 and 1462. Maximum penalty under current law: a $250,000 fine and up to five years in federal prison for each violation. It has not been repealed. It has not been struck down. It has been functionally unenforced since the 1970s, on the assumption that Roe and subsequent court rulings had rendered it dead letter.
Roe is gone. The statute is not.
The Revival
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s nine-hundred-page transition document for a second Trump administration, explicitly recommends that the Department of Justice enforce the Comstock Act against any person or entity that mails mifepristone or misoprostol across state lines.Project 2025 “seeks to revive provisions of the Comstock Act that banned mail delivery” of abortion materials. — Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership The legal theory is that the Act, as written in 1873, applies to FDA-approved abortion medications today exactly as it applied to nineteenth-century rubber pessaries.
No new law is required. A DOJ memo and an indictment are all that is required.
In December 2022, the Biden Office of Legal Counsel issued a memo concluding that Comstock applies only when the sender intends the recipient to use the material for unlawful purposes.In late 2022, the Office of Legal Counsel said that Comstock does not prohibit the mailing of mifepristone where the sender does not intend it to be used unlawfully. — NPR, Dec. 23, 2022 OLC opinion Under that reading, FDA-approved mifepristone mailed to a patient in a state where abortion remained legal would not violate Comstock. As of early 2026 that memo remains in effect, and the DOJ has so far declined to enforce Comstock against the mailing of abortion pills — but the men who wrote Project 2025 have made clear they intend to rescind it and reverse that posture, and advocates expect exactly that. The political condition they are building is one in which the question is open — and open is what you create before you act.
The Body It Lands On
Telemedicine abortion accounts for roughly 20% of all abortions performed in the United States. Most of those involve mifepristone shipped to a patient by mail or common carrier. If the DOJ revives Comstock, all of those shipments become federal felonies. Every prescribing physician, every pharmacy, every shipper, every patient who receives a mailed prescription becomes potentially liable. The chilling effect would be immediate. The legal effect — under the plain text of an unrepealed nineteenth-century statute — would be that abortion by medication is federally illegal nationwide.
The mechanism does not require Roe to be doubly overturned. It does not require Congress to pass anything. It does not require a Supreme Court ruling. It requires only a DOJ that decides to prosecute.
The Parallel
The Trump first-term DOJ used a similar playbook with FOSTA-SESTA (2018), which weaponized older statutory architecture to shut down sites like Backpage in the name of combating sex trafficking. The result was a wave of prosecutions, the disappearance of harm-reduction resources for sex workers, and the criminalization of activity that had operated in the open for decades. The Comstock revival follows the same template: take an unrepealed older statute, reinterpret it to cover modern conduct, and prosecute selectively to establish the precedent.
The men doing this are not embarrassed by the antiquity of Comstock. They prefer it. It is, to them, a feature — a connection to the moral universe they want to restore. Anthony Comstock himself bragged that his enforcement of the 1873 Act had driven fifteen people to suicide. The men reviving the statute have read the biography. They know what kind of project they are joining.
The Diagnosis
A nineteenth-century vice statute repurposed as a twenty-first-century reproductive ban, delivered by administrative action rather than legislation. When you cannot pass a federal abortion ban — because the votes are not there, because the politics are bad, because the public has not been prepared — you reach for the statute that is already on the books and you let the DOJ decide. Roe fell because Justice Alito reached back to Comstock 1873 and a seventeenth-century English jurist who burned women as witches. That was not ornamentation. That was a signal. They told us they were going back. They are going back.
The Ask
Demand your senators introduce and pass the Stop Comstock Act (introduced in 2024, blocked in committee) to repeal sections 1461 and 1462 of Title 18. Demand the next Democratic administration reissue the OLC memo restricting Comstock to materials sent with unlawful intent. Support the National Women’s Law Center and the Center for Reproductive Rights in their Comstock-revival litigation. If you are a physician or a pharmacist, talk to your state attorney general about shield-law protection from federal prosecution. The legal architecture for resistance exists. It needs to be built out before the DOJ moves, not after.
The Roberts Court tied us to the tracks. They forgot we brought bolt cutters. Receipt #7 lands next Friday.