How the Comstock Act Could Sway the Election

Donald Trump recently posted the following to his Truth Social site: “My administration will be great for women and their reproductive rights.” On the surface, this seems like a head-scratcher. Why post this statement, from the guy who chose the Supreme Court justices that made overturning Roe v. Wade a reality, and who has proclaimed time and again that he’s pro-life, but at the same time respects the states’ rights to allow the people to determine their abortion policies? Why did he think that posting this was at all a good idea?

Leave it to the Democrats. They may not be good for much, but their abilities in the field of opposition research are unmatched. And especially in the area of abortion rights, which to the left is sacramental in nature, they know how to use their research to sway public opinion far better than any Republican, including the current presidential candidate. So, let’s see what’s behind Trump’s seemingly out-of-left-field proclamation.

There is a little-known law known as the Comstock Act which was passed in 1873 to criminalize the mailing or shipping of obscene, lewd, or indecent materials. The law was named after Anthony Comstock, a devout Christian who believed, among other things, that contraceptives promoted lewdness. One of the goals, according to my sources on the law, was to restrict abortions and contraceptive usage (not sure what was commonly available in 1873 but that’s what the law said). However, the Dems found that J.D. Vance, among other senators, wrote to the Department of Justice asking for enforcement of the Comstock Act on the mailing or shipping of abortifacients such as the “morning after” pill. Dems being who they are, it’s an easy stretch to take this claim to its logical (to them) extreme, that Vance, and by extension Trump, secretly want to ban all abortions in America using the Comstock Act. In fact, this very thing (invoking the Comstock Act for abortifacients, not a total ban) is discussed in the controversial Project 2025 document that the Dems, despite Trump’s denials that he has anything to do with it, are trying to make stick to him like crazy glue.

So, while Trump seems to be tacking leftward on abortion to push back on the false narrative the Dems are creating and capture those pesky “soccer moms” whose votes are critical, the Dems are working overtime to convince the same cohort of voters that the real Trump position is the opposite of what he’s now saying. Unfortunately, when your position on abortion has been all over the map as Trump’s has been through the years, it’s not difficult for the Dems to convince voters who only look at the surface to buy their claims that Trump is as phony as a three-dollar bill in ever claiming to be on any side, but especially the pro-life one. Yet they will point to Vance along with Project 2025 as the main influencers of where Trump will go, which is laughable for anyone who has seen Trump operate. Of course, the Dems themselves, in largely hiding their real and hideous positions on abortion, are being even phonier than Trump in this regard. Does anyone remember Bill Clinton’s defense of his stance on abortion as “safe, legal and rare,” and how hollow that sounds now?

As inconsistent as Kamala Harris has been on most issues lately, you’ll notice that the one issue on which she never wavers is “a woman’s right to choose,” which is Dem-speak for no limits to abortion on demand. This, besides hating Trump and blaming him for all the nation’s ills, is the centerpiece of her campaign. And the more fear-mongering she does to sway that small percentage of independent voters in the swing states, the more pressure there will be on the Trump campaign to respond somehow. Trump’s recent Truth Social post, when viewed from that perspective, makes sense in terms of hard political gamesmanship. However, there exists in the calculus something that Trump is choosing to ignore: how will the pro-life lobby and pro-life voters view him now? As a traitor who used them and then left them high and dry, or as a candidate doing whatever it takes to defeat a conniving, Marxist-leaning opponent?

However he may wish it to be so, Trump’s revised position on abortion is not going to make the issue go away. In fact, you can bet that a sizeable chunk of time at the upcoming Trump-Harris debate will be spent on this topic. Trump’s Truth Social post, which no doubt was meant to assuage a certain demographic, may fail at that purpose while turning pro-life people off. If Trump goes off-script at the debate to further argue his pro-choice bona fides rather than leaving the issue as up to the states, that will leave pro-life voters yet again with a moral dilemma – hold their noses and vote for a candidate they see as morally flawed and unreliable, in order to prevent a far worse one from being elected. Or simply stay home.