A Legal Zombie vs. Mifepristone

If you have a daughter and live in a red-enough state, an abortion option she might need, and that is possibly in the back of your mind is in danger.

Today, the same Supreme Court that overturned Roe vs. Wade is set to rule on the legality of a drug that can end a pregnancy up to the tenth week.

I have read an argument to the effect that even this court may rule in favor of the drug, but what if it doesn't?

And why is an issue at all?

For the answers to that, and a hope for a relatively easy fix to this surprising problem, Slate presents a lightly-edited interview transcript on the 150-year-old law that anti-abortionists are working feverishly to revive.

Here they introduce the parties to the interview:

On Slate's legal and courts podcast Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick discussed the far-reaching implications of the Comstock Act's dubious resurrection and rehabilitation by these conservative judges with Mary Ziegler, an expert on the law, history, and politics of reproductive health care and conservatism in the U.S. from 1945 to the present. Ziegler is a professor at the University of California -- Davis School of Law, and the author of Roe: The History of a National Obsession...

And here is an excerpt:

Image by New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain due to publication date.

And so, [the 1873 Comstock Act] is simply the only way they see to get to a nationwide abortion ban. And the fact that everyone would hate it and no one would know what it means, and that in any kind of normal world, it would be unconstitutional to revive a law, a criminal law like this that no one has taken seriously in at least half a century -- None of that seems to matter. Which leads to the logical conclusion that sooner or later -- and I think maybe it will be before we get some kind of clarity from the Supreme Court, maybe it will be after -- we're going to have to see a bill demanding repeal of Comstock. Because the one piece of good news here is that Comstock is not, to your point, a constitutional matter where the Supreme Court has the final word. It's a statute that was passed by Congress. So in theory, a future Congress can make it go away. [bold added]

If the Democrats are at all serious about turning the tide on abortion, they will make this happen quickly. I don't see why they can't, even with the bare Republican majority in the House. There are pro-choice Republicans, and as noted elsewhere, many Republicans are averse to banning abortion outright.

-- CAV