Comstock Act

As the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to revive the Comstock Act, this seven-part forum explores the Act’s influence on American life.

Anthony Comstock, Victoria Woodhull, and what a battle from the 1870s means for 2024 and reproductive rights.

The anti-obscenity law is unenforceable and probably unconstitutional. Conservatives still want to use it to ban medication abortions.

Once considered a relic of moral panics past, the 1873 law criminalized sending "obscene, lewd or lascivious" materials through the mail.

With the Comstock Act of 1873 coming back to life, reproductive care, LGBTQ protections, and a host of other civil rights are now at risk.

Anthony Comstock, the 19th-century scourge of art and sex, is suddenly relevant again thanks to Donald Trump’s worst judge.

Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk rationalized his medication abortion opinion through a distorted reading of the long-dormant 1873 law.

This isn’t the first time the U.S. Postal Service has played a role in curbing women’s reproductive rights.

Hell hath no fury like a man with a vaginal douche named after him.

Anthony Comstock’s crusade against vice constrained the lives of ordinary Americans. His antagonists opened up history for feminists and other activists.

The United States Postal Service is under federal scrutiny. It’s not the first time.

Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett each had a different vision of reproductive freedom. Would reproductive rights be more secure if Dennett’s had prevailed?

Though Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett shared a mission, they took very different approaches. Their rivalry was political, sometimes even personal.

The provision, which makes it a felony to talk about abortion online, has been on hold since the Clinton administration. Could it be enforced in the future?

When professor Norman E. Himes published The Medical History of Contraception in 1936, he had made a tactical move, to legalize birth control.

ONE is a vital archive, but its focus on citizenship and “rational acceptance” ultimately blocked it from being the safe home for all that it claimed to be.

Considering a novel as a whole, rather than as the sum of its parts, was an approach favored by mid-20th-century literary critics. It was also useful for fighting book bans.

Mifepristone took longer to get approved than most drugs—but not because it was unsafe.

A reading list tracing the history of the birth control movement through novels.

Criticisms of women without biological children define motherhood too narrowly, as history reveals the many forms of motherhood.

Samuel Roth was the sort of bookseller whose wares came wrapped in brown paper.

One of the cases on which the judge relies said the opposite of what he claims it did.

The abortionist Madame Restell is central to the story of how American women’s reproductive freedom was dismantled in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In the past and present, librarians have fought book bans and censorship.

The Christian right is pushing a slate of laws to stop a new, vague offense they have dubbed “abortion trafficking.”

As ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ climbed the ratings ladder, the censorship bleep became a star of the show.

In an era of laissez-faire governance, a growing number of federal and state regulations were justified as necessary to protect public health and morality.

Contrary to contemporary claims, Susan B. Anthony and her peers rarely discussed abortion, which only emerged as a key political issue in the 1960s.

An 1860 census record offers a glimpse into the choices available to pregnant women who were enslaved.

Efforts to roll back abortion and contraception access aim to control women’s sexuality.