This is not the first time U.S. mail has been used to obtain materials necessary for reproductive autonomy — or the first time doing so has been outlawed. In 1873, Congress passed the Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, dubbed the Comstock Act. It banned mailing “indecent” materials, including information about contraception and abortion, as well as devices used for those purposes.
Then, the mail was many people’s main conduit for information they could not obtain easily, much like the Internet today. The Comstock Act restricted conversations about reproductive autonomy, resulting in the arrests and convictions of physicians who violated the law — not unlike what laws in Tennessee and elsewhere threaten.
The law’s namesake, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915), was a Union Army veteran who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (NYSSV). A crusader against anything he considered “immoral,” he campaigned not only against birth control and abortion, but against female independence itself. He took on Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a feminist newspaper published by Victoria Woodhull, who ran for president in 1872, and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, because it promoted woman’s suffrage and “free love” — a term for sex outside of marriage. Designated a special agent for the U.S. Post Office Department, Comstock personally arrested Ezra Heywood, who argued in 1878 in a pamphlet called “Cupid’s Yokes” that women should be able to control their own bodies. He also arrested a man who was convicted of obtaining a copy of “Cupid’s Yokes” through the mail.
“Comstockery” was ridiculed. In 1878, 50,000 people signed a petition to have the law overturned, arguing that it was used to “destroy the liberty of conscience in matters of religion, against the freedom of the press and to the great hurt of the learned professions.” Congress, however, refused. A House committee emphasized that the postal system had not been established to mail obscene materials.
In addition to the federal act, 24 states passed copycat laws. Comstock’s home state, Connecticut, banned contraceptives altogether.
That did not, of course, stop women from seeking birth control and abortions, nor did it stop sources who would supply information and material underground, whether safe or not. Euphemisms and innuendo were used to circumvent the laws. For example, herbal concoctions used to induce abortions were dubbed “female regulators.” Notably, in 1907, NYSSV reported finding ads in New York papers for “pills that could be used for criminal purposes” — that is, abortion. Hidden in small red boxes within larger boxes, the pills were “broadcast over the country to tempt young girls and women from paths of virtue, and as a menace to motherhood.”