In mid-April, a group of evangelical ministers and local New Mexico elected officials stood on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court to announce a new lawsuit that they hoped would soon be heard by the justices inside.

After neighboring Texas outlawed abortion, a handful of communities in eastern New Mexico enacted ordinances banning the importation or distribution of materials used to perform abortions within their city limits in an attempt to prevent abortion providers from relocating across the state border.

The eastern New Mexico communities justified the ordinances by pointing to a federal law passed in 1873 known as the Comstock Act. The Victorian-era anti-vice and obscenity law made it illegal to use the mail to send anything obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile, and any device or medication meant for contraception. And it also banned the mailing of [e]very article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion and [e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.

On the steps of the Supreme Court, the New Mexico local officials argued that the federal Comstock Act overrode an abortion rights law signed by the states Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, that prevented local governments from enacting ordinances to effectively ban abortion within their bounds.

Madame Governor, consider yourself Comstocked, David Gallegos, a Republican New Mexico state senator, said while announcing the lawsuit.

Invoking the 150-year-old Comstock Act before the Supreme Court would have been seen as foolish a year ago. The law was considered an anachronism of a forgotten age a prudish and out-of-touch extinct species, fossilized by court rulings and legislation that had rendered large portions of it moot. It largely existed as subject matter for students to learn about a long-lost era of social and political repression and the movements that led to its demise.

Weve been teaching about this for years and implicitly its understood by students as ancient history and rather bizarre, but ancient, said Leslie Reagan, author of When Abortion Was A Crime and a historian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

But in June 2022, with its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization, the Supreme Court overturned its precedent in Roe v. Wade that granted the right to an abortion. Suddenly, the Comstock Act and its abortion provisions, never repealed by Congress, came back to life and into the center of the abortion debate .

Republican attorneys general cited Comstock in a Feb. 1 letter to pressure Walgreens and CVS to stop providing abortion drugs to patients. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk invoked the act in his April 7 decision pulling the abortion drug mifepristone from the market, which was later blocked in part as the case continues to be appealed. And now the lawsuit out of New Mexico seeks to put the law squarely before the court.

The sudden resurrection of Comstock not only raises legal questions about a law once presumed dead but also unearths a long-buried history of the nations battles over abortion policy and the cultural fears that stand behind them.

Anthony Comstock And 19th Century Fears

Anthony Comstock was disgusted by what he saw when he was a Union soldier during the Civil War. But it wasnt the gruesome reality of war that disgusted him; it was the sexually explicit literature and pictures that his fellow soldiers shared with each other. After the war, he was similarly disgusted upon his move to New York City about the obscenity and prostitution he saw throughout the city.

In New York, Comstock connected with the wealthy donors who had founded the nascent Young Mens Christian Association to help suppress this vice. For these self-described Anglo-Saxon elites, a great disruption was underway that threatened their view of the family, the role of women and the future of their children. With their money, Comstock would found and lead the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the point of the spear for the anti-vice movement.