Having just passed the first anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision to restrict abortion access, it is worth considering Anthony Comstock’s terrible legacy of doing more to restrict American women’s reproductive rights than anyone else.

Among his many dubious tactics, Comstock used subterfuge to entrap those seeking or providing reproductive care, in the same way current anti-abortionists are doing, as referenced in Professor Carrie Baker’s informative and insightful column “Countering anti-abortion deception,” [Gazette, July 22]. 

Anthony Comstock was a large man with little tolerance. Much offended him. Sex. Lust. Lewdness. As a young man, he arrived with these views in New York, where he joined the Young Men’s Christian Association, already a strong anti-obscenity group. After a few years during which he spearheaded the YMCA’s Committee on the Suppression of Vice, he was unhappy with the feebleness of existing obscenity laws. So Mr. Comstock went to Washington, spending weeks to garner support for a bill he wrote to create robust, federal anti-obscenity legislation.

He succeeded dramatically, aided perhaps by his vivid display of sex toys in Vice President Schuyler Colfax’s room in the U.S. Capitol. The many members of Congress who came to view these objects appeared convinced, and helped pass Comstock’s bill. The legislation came to be known as the Comstock Act of 1873, and Comstock himself was appointed a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service, allowing him zealously to enforce his own provisions against providing or mailing obscene materials.

The Comstock Act defined as obscene anything remotely related to sex, imposing exorbitant fines and up to five years of hard labor for violations. To mail some graphic medical textbooks to students was a crime. In keeping with a common view that the only valid purpose of copulation — for women at least — was to have children, the law defined obscenity to include information, products, or “any article whatever for the prevention of conception.”

Women, especially poor women, who were desperate to regulate their pregnancies could not get information on how to do so; under the Comstock Act, it was a crime even to hand a woman a pamphlet about how not to conceive. Comstock deployed agents who masqueraded as anxious wives or husbands to entrap providers. When a pamphlet on how to avoid pregnancy was provided, the sender would be arrested.

After passage of the federal Comstock Act, states then started passing “little Comstock” laws supplementing its provisions. Neighboring New York state passed a law restricting the very discussion of contraception. When Margaret Sanger bravely opened the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, she was arrested, charged, and found guilty of violating the New York Comstock laws.

A Comstock agent professing to be an indigent father visited Sanger’s home begging for information on how to prevent pregnancy. Margaret was not there, but her husband, William, provided the pretender one of his wife’s pamphlets. Bill Sanger was arrested and sent to jail.

One hundred and fifty years later, the Comstock Act remains on the books. Thankfully, many of its provisions have grown dormant or have been overturned under repeated court challenges. Unbelievably, it was not until 1965 that the Supreme Court nullified a key Comstock provision by declaring, in Griswold v. Connecticut, that married couples had a constitutional right to use contraceptives without government interference.

Today, we risk repeating Anthony Comstock’s horrific history toward contraception and pregnancy. States are piling on to the Dobbs decision, citing a remaining loophole in the Comstock Act as the legal basis against mailing pills that can end pregnancy. In February, attorneys general in 20 states notified CVS and Walgreens of possible legal action if they mailed the medication mifepristone to clients in their states.

It is long past time to repeal the Comstock Act in its entirety. Let us rid our federal and state laws once and for all of these odious provisions. No U.S. state government, clothed in the fig leaf of “state’s rights,” should be allowed to dictate American women’s rights by exploiting a remaining provision in a law over a century out of date.

Kerry Dumbaugh lives in Holyoke.

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