We’ve Officially Entered the Comstock Gaslighting Era
From left, Roger Severino, Donald Trump, and Jonathan Mitchell. Photo: YouTube/Truth Social/YouTube The GOP is increasingly discussing the prospect of Donald Trump enforcing a 19th-century law to ban abortion nationwide if he wins a second term, and some Republicans seem desperate to swat away those concerns by telling us not to believe our lying eyes. Throughout the last few months, activists and lawmakers have avoided citing the Comstock Act by name (instead using its statute number), have told the public there's no way it'd be used for anything other than medication abortion (wrong), and have even commented to the press that Trump should shut up and not mention Comstock on the campaign trail. Last week, Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) said in a New York Times op-ed that she'll move to repeal the Comstock Act so Trump can't weaponize it to enact a national abortion ban, including on procedural abortions. The 1873 law would criminalize sending drugs or devices intended to perform abortions through the mail, or with carriers like UPS or FedEx. Roe v. Wade rendered Comstock unenforceable, but you know what happened to Roe. When Politico’s Pulse health newsletter covered Smith’s comments, they included an interview with Roger Severino, a former official in Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services. Severino now works at the Heritage Foundation, the ultraconservative think tank behind the so-called Project 2025 playbook for a future Republican administration. Severino wrote the HHS chapter of Project 2025, where he calls for a GOP president to enforce Comstock in order to ban the mailing of mifepristone for telehealth prescriptions, a move that could possibly end medication abortion in clinics if the drugs can’t be shipped. (Severino referred to Comstock in the playbook only by statute number, 18 U.S.C. 1461, a move copied both by 145 GOP members of Congress and by Justice Samuel Alito during arguments in the mifepristone case.) Severino tried to downplay the potential impact of Comstock to Politico by claiming it couldn't result in a nationwide ban because Project 2025 only calls for targeting mifepristone, not drugs and supplies that have other medical uses. (I'm reminded that Republicans said overturning Roe was simply about sending abortion "back to the states" and yet, here we are.) Here’s the relevant part, emphasis added: At least one Trump ally—former Trump administration official Roger Severino—is pushing back on arguments that Comstock enforcement would equate to an all-out abortion ban. Misoprostol, the other pill in the two-drug medication abortion regimen, can be used on its own to terminate pregnancies—but it also has other non-abortion medical uses. Severino believes the Comstock Act wouldn’t apply to drugs, like misoprostol, or supplies not exclusively used to perform abortions. “That’s my reading of the law, and I’m a pro-lifer,” Severino, vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, told Pulse. “These sorts of things that the left is saying a future President Trump would do can’t actually be done without additional legislation.” There are a couple of problems with these statements, said Greer Donley, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, who was also quoted in the Politico piece. Comstock is “exceptionally broad” and bans the mailing of any article or thing used for abortion—it doesn’t say it’s limited to drugs that are FDA-approved for abortion, she said. Misoprostol is approved for ulcers but is used off-label for abortion, miscarriage management, and labor induction. “There's literally nothing in the text that would constrain it in the way that it sounds like they're trying to constrain it,” Donley said. There’s also the fact that mifepristone does have a non-abortion medical use: as…