District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk referenced the act earlier this month in revoking FDA approval of mifepristone, a decision immediately appealed to the U.S. The campaign launched by abortion opponents to revive the Comstock Act is working: Recent court rulings in the abortion pill case suggest the dormant law can be applied today. Because there are manifold ways in which recipients in every state may lawfully use such drugs, including to produce an abortion, the mere mailing of such drugs to a particular jurisdiction is an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.’’

Postal Service stating that federal law does “not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decades-old approval of the key abortion pill mifepristone, cited the act in legal arguments, asking the court to find the 150-year-old law makes it illegal to send abortion pills through the mail.īut in December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, challenging the U.S. The plaintiffs in the high-profile Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. It was the latest legal challenge to abortion access to lean on the Comstock Act of 1873, federal statutes that ban the mailing of anything “obscene, lewd, lascivious” or considered morally impure, including abortifacients or abortion-related materials. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed into law a measure prohibiting public entities from interfering with reproductive and gender-affirming care access. When officials in a small New Mexico city sued the governor and attorney general over their ordinance placing restrictions on abortion clinics earlier this month, they argued that a late 19th century federal anti-obscenity law superseded state law. Several New Mexico towns are using an 1873 federal law to push back against a new state law to protect abortion access.

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