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27-03-2024
WASHINGTON/ NEW YORK: US anti-abortion activists, including allies of Donald Trump, have a strategy to ban abortion nationwide, one that bypasses Congress and the American people. It’s a plan that hinges on Trump’s re-election in November and the use of a little-known 19th Century law.
At this year’s annual “Pro-Life Summit” on 20 January, guests listened to a keynote speech from Marjorie Dannenfelser, head of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the country’s most influential anti-abortion groups.
Dannenfelser is widely credited with convincing Donald Trump to appoint three anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court during his presidential term. In June 2022, those appointees helped overturn Roe v Wade, rescinding the nationwide right to abortion.
It was a generational victory for the anti-abortion movement. The runway had opened, activists said at the time, to an abortion-free future but in the nearly two years since, their campaign has stalled in crucial ways. The American public has shown consistent support for abortion access, even in conservative states and the movement’s ultimate goal, a federal abortion ban has remained out of reach, a near-impossibility in a divided Congress that can unite behind few legislative priorities.
The political reality has not escaped anti-abortion campaigners.
Addressing her audience in the grand ballroom of a Washington DC hotel a rapt crowd of the movement’s most devoted followers, Dannenfelser spent nearly half of her speech urging the audience not to lose hope.
“It hasn’t been missed on any of us, right? That it has been hard,” she said. “We all know” but anti-abortion activists may have a trump card. Conservative leaders, including allies of Trump, have mapped out a new path to outlaw abortion. The plan could work, experts say, if the former president returns to the White House.
“There could be a de facto nationwide ban that Trump could try to enforce on day one if he wins,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, and a leading expert on the US abortion debate. “It’s the Comstock Act.”
The Comstock Act, championed by anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and passed in 1873, made it a federal crime to send or receive any material deemed “obscene, lewd or lascivious”. The statute makes specific mention of birth control and abortion, barring any materials designed or intended for “the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion”.
Over the next century, various court rulings clarified the law’s meaning, gradually narrowing its scope. In 1971, Congress removed most of Comstock’s restrictions on contraceptives and two years later, through Roe, the Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion. By then, the act was seen as a largely unenforceable relic, and remained dormant for 50 years but now, within right-wing circles, the Comstock Act is being revived. (Int’l News Desk)
