By Comstock’s standard, the law was a great success: he claimed to have destroyed 15 tons of books, arrested more than 4,000 people and driven at least 15 people to suicide. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Comstock Act was used to prohibit the mailing of many literary classics, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” to works by James Joyce and Walt Whitman.Ĭomstock himself proudly carried a gun and scoured the mail for cases involving information about abortion or contraception, even if a doctor provided it. The law he inspired barred not just the mailing of “obscene books” but also birth control and abortion drugs and devices. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who has written about the Comstock Act for CNN Opinion, described Comstock as being “obsessed by what he saw as the decaying morals of a country preoccupied with sex.” He was known for seizing contraband like contraceptives and condoms in the name of rooting out obscenity, according to the New York Historical Society.

It’s important to note that no matter what Kacsmaryk does, it will be appealed up through the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals and potentially to the Supreme Court.īut perhaps the most incredible question Kacsmaryk faces is whether an 1870s chastity law named for an anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock, should be resuscitated and applied to the medicine that now accounts for a majority of US abortions.Ĭomstock operated the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and was a special agent of the US Postal Service.

That a drug, which studies suggest is on par with ibuprofen in terms of safety, is actually so harmful it should be reconsidered by the FDA.ĬNN’s Tierney Sneed wrote a longer list of takeaways from the hearing, where anti-abortion rights doctors and activist groups teed up their lawsuit in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom to further limit access to abortion care in the US.

What are the states of matter