Opinion | Trump Says Abortion Will Be Left to the States. Don’t Believe Him.

Key to these plans is the Comstock Act, the 19th-century anti-vice law named for the crusading bluenose Anthony Comstock, who persecuted Margaret Sanger, arrested thousands, and boasted of driving 15 of his targets to suicide. Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act banned the mailing of every “obscene, lewd, lascivious, indecent, filthy or vile article,” including “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine or thing” intended for “producing abortion.” Until quite recently, the Comstock Act was thought to be moot, made irrelevant by a series of Supreme Court decisions on the First Amendment, contraception and abortion. But it was never actually repealed, and now that Trump’s justices have scrapped Roe, his allies believe they can use Comstock to go after abortion nationwide.

“We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan F. Mitchell, Texas’ former solicitor general and the legal mind behind the state’s abortion bounty law, told The New York Times in February. Mitchell is very much a MAGA insider; he represented Trump in the Supreme Court case arising from Colorado’s attempt to boot the ex-president off the ballot as an insurrectionist. As The Times has reported, Mitchell is on a list of lawyers vetted by America First Legal, a nonprofit led by the Trump consigliere Stephen Miller, as having the “spine” to serve in a second Trump administration.

Mitchell is far from the only Trumpist dreaming of bringing Comstock back from the dead. The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, a coalition of major right-wing think tanks, has published a 920-page plan for a new Trump administration, “Mandate for Leadership.” In it, Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s vice president and a former Trump Department of Justice official, lays out an agenda for the department to target abortion medication.

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” he wrote of Comstock. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.” (“Mandate for Leadership” also says that a Trump F.D.A. should repeal approval for medication abortion.)

A resurrected Comstock Act wouldn’t just stop women from ordering abortion pills through the mail. It could also prevent doctors and pharmacies from dispensing them, since neither the Postal Service nor express carriers like UPS and FedEx would be allowed to ship them in the first place. And it would give the Justice Department a rationale for cracking down on the networks that help provide pills to women in states with abortion bans.