America in the 1870s was a society obsessed with sexual morality. After the Civil War, some abolitionists turned their attention to ridding the country of vice. Temperance campaigns and anti-prostitution efforts dominated newspaper headlines and the work of charity organizations.
Anthony Comstock, a former Union soldier, became one of the most prominent players in this movement, with his zealous anti-obscenity work. Obsessed with rooting out pornography and sexual material, he began his career in New York where he founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, personally leading surprise raids on bars, saloons, sex shops and houses of prostitution. He also went after newspaper editors and pamphlet authors whom he deemed immoral, including suffragist Victoria Woodhull.
Backed by wealthy donors, Comstock took his impressive collection of pornographic pictures, sex toys and contraceptive materials to Washington, D.C., where he displayed them at the Capitol to help galvanize Congress to pass anti-obscenity legislation.
In March 1873, Congress responded by passing an “Act for the Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of immoral Use” — popularly known as the Comstock Act. The law made it illegal to send anything considered “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” through the U.S. Postal Service. Included among the list of “nonmailable” items: every “article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.”
States soon followed by passing their own “mini-Comstock” laws, which they layered onto existing antiabortion and anti-contraceptive laws that they had enacted beginning in the 1840s. This phalanx of laws meant that for decades, the Postal Service hired postal inspectors to spy on private citizens’ mail to catch them sending anything deemed immoral by the act — including private discussions about birth control or abortion in personal letters. It was a massive invasion of privacy. Punishments could include prison time, large fines or even hard labor.
What few realize is that the initial draft of the Comstock Act contained an exception for physicians. While the Senate Committee on Post Office and Post Roads was drafting the bill, Sen. George Edmunds (R-Vt.) added an amendment stating that it prohibited “any article or medicine for the prevention of conception, or for causing abortion, except on a prescription of a physician in good standing, given in good faith.” Upon seeing the new version of the law, Comstock was appalled, writing in his diary that Edmunds probably had doctor friends “in the business” that he was trying to shield.