Comstock could also be used, Mitchell said, to challenge laws that compel state universities, for instance, to stock abortion pills at campus health centers.
Separately, a group of nearly 60 former Justice Department officials who served in Democratic and Republican administrations said Kacsmaryk had “gravely misinterpreted” the Comstock law.“Make no mistake: the court’s interpretation is gravely incorrect; Congress intended the Comstock laws to prohibit only distribution intended to produce unlawful abortions,” they wrote in a brief filed with the 5th Circuit.
Invoking the Comstock Act to ban abortion drugs is a “fantastical legal theory that should be not even worthy of a first-year law student’s late-night dreamings,” said Andrea Miller, president of the National Institute for Reproductive Health, an abortion rights advocacy group, warning of further consequences.
The Biden administration’s legal memo “does not protect CVS or any other individual or entity from being prosecuted within the five-year statute of limitations for the illegal mailing or interstate shipment of abortion drugs by a future Presidential administration that respects the rule of law and the sanctity of life, even for conduct that occurs today,” Sen.
, according to several historians and comments attributed to Comstock. A draft of his namesake bill contained an exception for licensed physicians, before it was amended in a hasty debate on the Senate floor.According to an interview published in the May 22, 1915, issue of Harper’s Weekly, Comstock expressed dismay that his act was being used to interfere with physicians’ private practices.