The Comstock Act is actually an anti-vice law of the nineteenth century. Its objective was to prohibit the mailing of any substance, medicine, drug, or thing that could foster abortion or any “lewd” writings. The law has become a critical issue in a fresh court ruling threatening access to a popular abortion drug in the United States.
The Comstock Act has remained dormant for around the last 50 years, but presently, some conservative states and a few anti-abortion groups that intend to prohibit the mailing of a pill called the mifepristone, have successfully brought the Act. The pill has been used in approximately more than half of the United States' abortion cases.
A federal judge in the US state of Texas showed his support to Christian conservatives by saying that the Comstock Act bars sending the drug in question through the mail.
The Case
Mathew J. Kacsmaryk, a U.S. District Judge ruled in a recent case that the Food and Drug Administration's approval of the drug mifepristone around twenty years ago violated federal rules. The judge said that the Food and Drug Administration failed to notice "legitimate safety concerns" with the pill. The pill has been available since the year 2000.
As a result, mifepristone's key drug maker and the Biden administration filed appeal notices within just a few hours of the decision.
An order from a Washington state judge and the Texas ruling came simultaneously. The order stated that in Democratic-led states that filed their own lawsuit, the FDA must be maintaining access to the drug.
Kacsmaryk, a former lawyer for the First Liberty Institute made use of the terminology of anti-abortion advocates all the time during his opinion. He referred to the doctors prescribing mifepristone with terms like abortionists. He further used terms like medication abortions as "chemical abortions" and fetuses as "unborn humans".
In case the ruling is upheld, the 67-page decision of Kacsmaryk would dismantle recent FDA changes curated to make access to mifepristone easy.
The Comstock Act
The Comstock Act was originally passed in the year 1873. The Act is named for an anti-vice crusader. The intent of the Act was to prohibit the mailing of contraceptives, along with stopping “lewd” writings, and any other “instrument, drug, substance, medicine, or any other thing” that could be made to use in an abortion.
The scope of the law has been continually narrowed by Congress and federal courts. These eliminated the reference to contraceptives in the year 1970s. The federal government has not stressed the law since the decade of 1930s, as per legal experts.
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