Nearly three dozen anti-abortion groups have called on newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche to dust off a 150-year-old law and use it to effectively stop telehealth abortion nationwide: Opinion.

Major anti-abortion groups are calling on the Trump administration to enforce the Comstock Act, a dormant 19th-century law that conservatives have long seen as a backdoor avenue to ban the mailing of abortion pills across the country—if not outlaw abortion entirely. 

Nearly three dozen right-wing groups—including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life of America, and Men for Life (so glad the men are getting involved)—asked newly-confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche in an Aug. 7 letter to have the Department of Justice enforce the 1873 law. The Comstock Act says, in part, that no one can “knowingly use the mail to send, and the U.S. Postal Service may not deliver, any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” 

The Comstock Act is named for Anthony Comstock, a Victorian-era moral crusader who convinced Congress in 1873 to ban “lewd” and “obscene” materials from the mail—a category that, for the prudish Mr. Comstock, included not just pornography, but also contraceptives, abortion information, and even medical textbooks with illustrations of human anatomy.

The Comstock Act has lain dormant for decades. But conservatives, emboldened by Blanche’s private anti-abortion pledge to faith leaders, are now trying to dust off this old law. Their plan? To weaponize it to restrict bodily autonomy and continue their attacks on abortion rights.

Using Comstock, conservatives could effectively ban abortion nationwide without passing a single........

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