The GOP nominee will campaign on the status quo but likely try to enforce the ghost national ban once in office.

The story behind Heritage’s claim begins in the 19th century, with the passage of a sexual purity law that was interpreted to make it a crime to mail or receive items intended, designed, or adapted for abortion. Exactly what the Comstock Act said or meant, not least when it came to abortion, was unclear at the time it passed. States were then, for the first time, criminalizing abortion early in pregnancy, with life exceptions. Members of Congress seemed unsure whether the act covered “lawful” or medically indicated abortion.

In the years since, courts have interpreted the Comstock Act not as a flat ban on all abortions. By the 1930s, courts were interpreting the law as having a sort of implied health exception that applied to physicians and those transacting with them. No one has mentioned the statute in the context of abortion for decades.

  • DrPop@lemmy.one
    361·
    1 year ago

    Why are we basing our laws around healthcare on an act made in the 1800s?

  • snownyte@kbin.social
    18·
    1 year ago

    Then the next Republican president after this Republican president will “Have a plan to extort and rip away LGBTQ rights once and for all without approval” and then the next Republican president after that one will have another plan to expand religious influence across the country. Any step they’ll take, to send us back to a time where in their world view, women were just good at popping babies, gays and blacks are the butt of jokes all of the time, God and only one God was all we needed and the idea of being smarter than another is just a crime in of itself.

    It’s not Idiocracy, people. It’s true damnation in reality.

  • BigMacHole@lemm.ee
    32·
    1 year ago

    See LIBTARDS! It WAS a State’s Rights Issue! And if I as a Republican could read I would STILL call it a State’s Right issue because I HATE women!