The group emphasizes on its web site that the act gives for “criminal penalties” as much as 5 years in jail for a primary offense. “The law still means what it says — abortion-causing items are not to be mailed,” the group’s web site says. “Congress has had the option to change that in the past. It didn’t.”
In the 1870s, Mr. Comstock himself grew to become its chief enforcer, designated by Congress as a particular agent of the Post Office to make arrests for sending something from artwork pictures and sex-education pamphlets to contraception strategies. At the tip of his profession, Mr. Comstock mentioned he had helped convict sufficient individuals to fill a 61-coach passenger practice.
The final time the act was amended, in 1996, Patricia Schroeder, then a Democratic consultant from Colorado, fought to take away the supply about mailing abortion supplies, however the effort fell brief. “Comstockery has been given a new lease on life by this Congress,” Ms. Schroeder, who died in March, mourned on the time in a flooring speech.
Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, was concerned within the 1996 effort. The repeal failed, he mentioned in a latest interview, as a result of on the time, “abortion was overwhelmingly unpopular among Republicans and also seen as a wedge issue that could be used against Democrats.”
Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House in 1996, mentioned that then and now, “both parties face the challenge of avoiding being the extremist” on abortion. He distinguished between narrowing the Comstock Act and repealing it completely, saying repeal “would be a different kind of fight.”
But Mr. Frank thinks the politics have modified and the Comstock Act itself is exterior the mainstream. “Then abortion was seen as a terrible issue for the left,” he mentioned of the Nineteen Nineties. “But now the situation is reversed. Let’s see if the Republicans really want to stick with this kind of extreme old law.”
Source: www.nytimes.com