Alito and Thomas kept bringing up Comstock. That scared abortion rights supporters.
Antiabortion activists have spent several years resurrecting the Comstock Act, arguing that a future Republican administration could use the 151-year-old law to block the mailing of all abortion-related drugs and materials to effectively ban abortions nationwide.
The Supreme Court may be about to hand them a legal road map.
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas repeatedly invoked the Comstock Act during Tuesday’s oral arguments regarding the abortion drug mifepristone, pressing lawyers about whether the 1873 federal law should apply to abortion drugs sent through the mail today. Alito rejected the Biden administration’s argument that the law is obsolete — it has not been applied in nearly a century — with the conservative justice insisting that Food and Drug Administration officials should have accounted for the law when expanding access to mifepristone by mail in 2021.
“This is a prominent provision. It’s not some obscure subsection of a complicated, obscure law,” Alito said. “Everybody in this field knew about it.”
The Supreme Court is reviewing whether the FDA wrongly approved and expanded access to mifepristone, and based on questioning during Tuesday’s hearing, legal experts anticipate that the court will rule to preserve the health agency’s authority. But some experts and Biden officials fear Alito and Thomas are planning to write a separate opinion focused solely on the Comstock Act, arguing that the law remains viable and providing legal cover to a future administration that seeks to invoke it.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/03/26/comstock-act-supreme-court-abortion-pill/
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