Is the Comstock Act the Way to Ban the Abortion Pill?

A little-known act used by Evangelicals to block pornography flowing through the U.S. Postal Service in the 19th century may have a new purpose in the 21st: Ending at-home abortions for good.

Few have heard of the Comstock Act, named for USPS Inspector and New England Calvinist Anthony Comstock, but it was a powerful tool Republicans used to battle debauchery and mitigate abortion after the Civil War. Comstock used his position in the Grant administration—and status as a Civil War veteran—to lobby Congress to outlaw delivery of "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material, including information about obtaining abortions and contraception.

The Comstock Act led directly to the arrest of Madame Restell, a New York abortionist famous for marketing early at-home abortion pills nearly 150 years ago. (There's truly nothing new under the sun.)

Comstock went on to battle future Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Emma Goldman, a Russian-born anarchist, feminist, and contraception advocate who knew Sanger through her radical socialist circles.

The law eventually fell out of favor with the rise of radical feminism and the birth control/abortion industries. In the 1970s, Congress repealed provisions that made it a crime to mail contraception (eventually giving rise to a powerful population control empire built on sex I've detailed here). The 1973 Roe v Wade decision ended enforcement altogether.

Now the battle to end abortion is reviving talk about the Comstock Act in both pro-life and pro-abortion circles, with both sides seeing it as a nuclear option. But will conservatives take it?

(RELATED: Defunding USAID: Trump’s Biggest Gift to Pro-Lifers After Dobbs)

Checkmate

The 2022 Dobbs decision may have overturned the national "right" to abortion set down by Roe 52 years ago. But it also pushed the fight toward at-home abortions enabled by mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs used in the abortion pill to induce miscarriage.

Even before Dobbs, Planned Parenthood was evolving the abortion industry toward "telehealth," or at-home abortions, during the COVID lockdowns. In 2022, just 7% of all abortions were performed at home; in 2024 it had risen to 25%.

Pro-lifers are fighting back. In April, the Foundation for the Restoration of America revealed that one in 10 women who take the pill will experience a serious adverse event, including death—a statistic 22 times higher than the FDA admits.

Restoration News also revealed last week how the Clintons brought mifepristone to America through a shady approval process involving a eugenics group backed by dark money interests.

While the Comstock Act remains on the books, the Biden Justice Department avoided enforcement by interpreting it to only prohibit mailing materials or drugs used for illegal abortions—carving out an exception for mifepristone—which requires proving intent to break the law. That effectively ended all enforcement of the law for four years, notes KFF.org: "Because there are legal uses of abortion drugs in every state including to save the life of the pregnant person, there is no way to determine the intent of the sender."

Since Dobbs, the Left has been clamoring to kill the Comstock Act altogether before conservatives have a chance to resurrect it under Trump. Last week, Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper (CO) introduced the Stop Comstock Act to abort Trump administration enforcement—suggesting Democrats know how powerful this 19th century law could be to the pro-life cause, if they'll dare to use it.

So what options does that leave conservatives?

For one, the Trump administration can—and should—immediately rescind the 2022 Biden memorandum protecting mifepristone and misoprostol. That opens the door to prosecuting criminals who mail the abortion pill; after all, the Comstock Act remains U.S. law and criminalizes knowingly mailing abortion-related items (from the pills to the equipment used to perform non-chemical abortions). That at least would restrict the abortion pill to in-person pickup at pharmacies, limiting the abortion industry's reach in states that have restricted abortion.

That sets up the Trump administration for the coup de grâce: Recalling the abortion pill through the FDA as too unsafe to be marketed. Period. As we've documented, the pill was hastily greenlit by the Biden FDA using COVID as an excuse to mail it to women's homes. Yet there's shockingly little oversight about how mifepristone is prescribed considering one in 10 women who take it face serious threats to their health. There's no way, for instance, to verify if a pregnancy is ectopic, setting up a potentially lethal scenario for a woman who believes she's aborted her child when, in fact, she has not.

Defeat the Left on the abortion pill and you deal them a mortal blow.

 (INVESTIGATION: How the Clinton Admin Forced the Abortion Pill on the United States)