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#1870s — Public Fediverse posts

Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #1870s, aggregated by home.social.

  1. Analysis: Abortion pill access may be endangered by this 19th century law

    The Wild West of the post-Roe v. Wade legal landscape is focused on a lone federal judge in Amarillo, Texas, who could use a 19th century law to limit access to abortion medication for every American woman.

    The judge, 45-year-old #Matthew #Kacsmaryk, held a hearing Wednesday about whether he should impose a preliminary injunction that would require the US Food and Drug Administration to withdraw or suspend its approval of the drug, #mifepristone, while a larger case progresses.

    Mifepristone is taken along with another drug, #misoprostol, as part of the two-step #medication #abortion process.

    Misoprostol can be prescribed on its own, but it is considered less effective.

    Kacsmaryk, who sounded open to the idea of restricting access to mifepristone, will have to agree with some or all of these general points raised if he decides to issue an injunction:

    * That doctors who don’t perform abortions and live in Texas, where abortions are already banned, are harmed by abortions conducted elsewhere

    * That a single federal judge in Amarillo should do what no federal judge has ever done and unilaterally rescind an FDA approval.

    * That a drug, which studies suggest is on par with ibuprofen in terms of safety, is actually so harmful it should be reconsidered by the FDA.

    CNN’s Tierney Sneed wrote a longer list of takeaways from the hearing, where anti-abortion rights doctors and activist groups teed up their lawsuit in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom to further limit access to abortion care in the US.

    It’s important to note that no matter what Kacsmaryk does, it will be #appealed up through the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals and potentially to the Supreme Court.

    But perhaps the most incredible question Kacsmaryk faces is whether an #1870s #chastity #law named for an anti-vice crusader, #Anthony #Comstock, should be resuscitated and applied to the medicine that now accounts for a majority of US abortions.

    Comstock operated the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and was a special agent of the US Postal Service. He was known for seizing contraband like contraceptives and condoms in the name of rooting out obscenity, according to the New York Historical Society.

    Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis who has written about the Comstock Act for CNN Opinion, described Comstock as being “obsessed by what he saw as the decaying morals of a country preoccupied with sex.”

    Ziegler writes:

    The law he inspired #barred not just the #mailing of “#obscene #books” but also #birth #control and #abortion #drugs and #devices.

    In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the #Comstock #Act was used to prohibit the mailing of many literary classics, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” to works by James Joyce and Walt Whitman

    cnn.com/2023/03/16/politics/mi