Advancing American Freedom President Tim Chapman joined 34 other pro-life and conservative leaders in a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, urging him to follow through on the commitment he made at his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to evaluate whether the Office of Legal Counsel’s opinion interpreting the Comstock Act “reflects the actual statutory text that Congress enacted.”
The Comstock Act, codified at 18 U.S.C. §1461, provides that no person may knowingly use the mail to send, and the U.S. Postal Service may not deliver, any “article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” The signatories write that in its opinion dated December 23, 2022, the OLC “effectively created a statute that Congress did not pass but would be essentially unenforceable so that it would pose no obstacle to the Biden administration’s goal of greater abortion access.”
The OLC’s reading turns on the sender’s intent and the recipient’s intended use. As the letter puts it: “Not only does this language appear nowhere in the Comstock Act but, as a practical matter, a sender’s subjective intent and a recipient’s intended use are unknowable, making the Comstock Act a dead letter.” The plain text, the coalition argues, focuses instead on “article[s] or thing[s]” and whether they can be used for abortion — the same focus reflected in the OLC opinion’s own title.