Dems Spotlight Project 2025 Plan to Wield 'Zombie Law' Against Abortion Rights

Two congressional Democrats who spearheaded the Stop Project 2025 Task Force warned Thursday that abortion rights opponents are laying the groundwork to revive and wield a 151-year-old "zombie law" to ban abortion nationwide.

In a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden, who is under growing pressure to drop out of the 2024 race, Reps. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) noted that the Project 2025 agenda crafted by the Heritage Foundation and other right-wing groups "includes a detailed blueprint for a future Republican president to impose a backdoor national abortion ban with a stroke of the pen by willfully misapplying this antiquated and unconstitutional statute."

The statute in question is the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that prohibits the mailing of any "instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing" that "may, or can, be used or applied for producing abortion." Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) is leading the Democratic effort to defang the law.

According to the health policy research organization KFF, the Comstock Act "has not been applied to the mailing of abortion materials in the last fifty years." A trio of legal experts recently described the law as the "most significant national threat to reproductive rights."

Huffman and Raskin noted in their letter Thursday that the statute "was used to prosecute freethinking publisher DeRobigne Mortimer 'D.M.' Bennett," who "was sentenced to 13 months of hard labor in 1879 for mailing an anti-marriage pamphlet that advocated for women's bodily autonomy."

"Emma Goldman was hounded, silenced, and incarcerated for speaking out in favor of contraception," the House Democrats added. "Ida Craddock was charged multiple times for distributing writings on women's rights and sexual relations between husband and wife; she was re-arrested in 1902 after serving a three-month prison sentence, convicted, and died by suicide before serving her five-year sentence in a federal penitentiary. Anna Trow Lohman also died by suicide rather than facing trial for distributing birth control and abortifacients."

"MAGA activists are now working to resuscitate this near-dormant law to advance their far-right agenda."

Huffman and Raskin wrote that while the U.S. Supreme Court "largely overturned most of the Comstock Act through landmark decisions on free speech, abortion, and birth control" over the course of the 20th Century, "many of these decisions have been eroded and attacked" by the current conservative-dominated Supreme Court.

"MAGA activists are now working to resuscitate this near-dormant law to advance their far-right agenda," warned the two Democrats, who called on Biden to issue pardons for "Bennett, Goldman, Craddock, and any others who were unjustly convicted under the Comstock Act" to make clear that he "stands against any efforts in the past, present, or future to weaponize the Comstock Act against Americans' individual rights to free speech and reproductive autonomy."

Huffman and Raskin's letter came a day after The Washington Posthighlighted that Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—the running mate of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—joined dozens of GOP lawmakers last year in calling on Attorney General Merrick Garland to "shut down all mail-order abortion operations," citing the Comstock Act and other federal statutes.

The Biden Justice Department has said the Comstock Act "does not prohibit the mailing of certain drugs that can be used to perform abortions where the sender lacks the intent that the recipient of the drugs will use them unlawfully."

While Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025 and stopped short of explicitly endorsing a federal abortion ban, the platform that Republican delegates approved earlier this week at the party's convention in Milwaukee declares, "We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied life or liberty without due process, and that the states are, therefore, free to pass laws protecting those rights."

As The Intercept's Shawn Musgrave observed Wednesday, abortion opponents welcomed that line as an endorsement of the notion of "fetal personhood."

"Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights—without the need for any new laws or amendments," Musgrave wrote. "This aligns neatly with Project 2025's roadmap and Vance's views."