The old days of coat-hanger abortions will never come back, we reassured ourselves as Roe was repeatedly threatened over the years. Even once the Dobbs decision handed the power to regulate abortion to the states, we told ourselves there would be no return to bleeding out on motel room floors or back alleys, now that most abortions can happen discreetly and safely at home, thanks to the abortion pill mifepristone.

But beware: Modern American Puritans who sit on judicial benches and state legislatures are going after mifepristone and even contraception. How? By jolting new life into an 1873 federal anti-obscenity law that has lain dormant for decades—the Comstock Act. The act criminalized contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, pornography, or sexual content (including medical advice), making it illegal to send such items via the US mail and eventually any means of interstate conveyance.

“I knew about Comstock before Dobbs, but I wanted to say nothing about it,” anti-abortion legal mastermind Jonathan Mitchell told the Nation’s Amy Littlefield in the spring of 2023. “I really was hoping no one would say anything about the Comstock laws until Dobbs came out.”

Dobbs accomplished, Mitchell and the other moral crusaders seized on Comstock with relish. Mitchell used it to challenge local “sanctuary” laws protecting abortion rights, and others permitting teens from getting access to contraception without parental permission. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of Texas cited the Comstock Act to challenge the FDA’s 24-year-old approval of mifepristone. That case is now before the Supreme Court, where Justices Thomas and Alito brought Comstock up in oral arguments. Even if the court does not take this opportunity to resurrect Comstock (given the vast implications for the entire medical regulatory landscape), Mitchell and his ilk are launching a volley of cases citing the act, all but ensuring that the court gets another chance. “From my standpoint, I want to get Comstock to the Supreme Court as quickly as possible,” Mitchell told Littlefield.

So what is the Comstock Act? Many of us have heard of it, if only vaguely. We may also have heard the term “Comstockery,” defined as the “strict censorship of materials considered obscene” and “censorious opposition to alleged immorality,” and know that it was coined by playwright George Bernard Shaw.

The occasion was the removal of Shaw’s Man and Superman from the shelves of the New York Public Library in 1905. Taking umbrage and spotting an opportunity, Shaw fired back, announcing his intention to bring “Mrs. Warren’s Profession”—a play that had been banned in London for its frank discussion of prostitution—to New York, telling the city’s papers, “Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all.”

Anthony Comstock, by then America’s leading moralist, hadn’t heard of Shaw until the playwright’s words were published in the papers. He did a little quick brushing up and fired back, calling Shaw an “Irish smut peddler” and alerting the New York police to the dangerous content of Shaw’s play. He also wrote a huffy letter to Shaw’s producer Arnold Daly, calling “Mrs Warren’s Profession” “filthy” and quoting, with an ominous tone of warning, recent court decisions in obscenity cases. Daly, a savvy publicity man, did not let the opportunity go by. He sent Comstock’s letter to all the papers, along with an exquisitely civil response inviting Comstock to come to a rehearsal.

The result? Ticket sales went through the roof, and the play was sold out weeks before the curtain went up. The police were called forth on opening night—not to raid the play, but to dispel the overflow mob in the streets clamoring to get in. Score one for GBS.

But this was but one defeat in a long career of victories, for by then Comstock had already enjoyed decades of unimaginable power. His crusade against “obscenity” had driven abortion underground (which lasted until Roe v. Wade in 1973), and resulted in a ban on using or distributing birth control (which lasted until Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965). But while it had been reined in, the Comstock Act remained on the books, burrowing underground like a cicada, awaiting the Puritans of our day to revive it.

Comstock was born in 1844, in New Canaan, Connecticut, the son of a well-to-do farmer father and a mother who gave birth to a total of 10 children. The Comstocks were both of unbroken Puritan lineage, and Anthony and his siblings were reared in the austere tradition of the Congregational church. Bible stories were the bedtime fare, and Anthony’s mother, Polly, who died when he was 10 (of complications from childbirth), tended to choose stories of moral heroism and beating back Satan, a very real presence who lurked everywhere with his inventory of earthly temptations.

By the time Comstock was 18, he broke into the establishment of a man who traded in liquor without a license, and opened faucets and smashed kegs with an axe. As a finishing touch, he left a note saying that the guy had better quit his business, because next time the building would burn.