In a video that premiered in late October, Minnesota senator Tina Smith sat next to Anthony Comstock, the United States postal inspector and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice who died in 1915—or rather, someone acting as Mr. Comstock, in a costume replete with grey sideburns, bushy eyebrows, and a black top hat.
Produced by the Abortion Access Front, a reproductive rights nonprofit, the video is entitled the “Debate of the Century” and features Smith critiquing the Comstock Act—a set of laws architected by Comstock in the 1800s, prohibiting the mailing of “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” materials, like pornography, or any article or thing “intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion.” This so-called “zombie law,” as Smith explained to her stage partner, is still on the books and could be used by president-elect Donald Trump’s next administration to restrict access to abortion nationwide—without a single bill falling on congressional desks.
“You talking women quench your insatiable thirst for horndoggery by worshiping at the altar of abortion and contraception; you use the US mail as your personal delivery service of lewd goods and all things abortion,” the fake-Comstock said in the video, to the side-eye glance of his opponent. “All things which one Senator Tina Smith can use to pollute the virtues of the people of our righteous, Christian nation.”
“I personally want to welcome Mr. Comstock to the 21st century,” Smith rebutted, adding, “where women can currently vote, own property, hold public office, and even wear pants.”
The appearance was a chance for Smith to spread awareness about the 1800s law, and about the bill she had introduced a few months earlier, the Stop Comstock Act, which aims to repeal the part of the law that could be used to prohibit the mailing of abortion-related items.
Smith, who has been a senator since 2018, was one of the first elected officials to raise alarms about Comstock, and has continued to prioritize its threat in the weeks since Trump won the presidential election. Before joining public office, Smith worked as Planned Parenthood’s executive vice president of external affairs in Minnesota—making her the highest-ranking former Planned Parenthood executive in US politics, and the only senator to ever work for the organization. This experience, she told me, taught her “how fundamental it is that access to health care is there for people,” and “that we can trust people to make the decisions without a bunch of politicians trying to tell them what to do or tell them when to do it or tell them how to do it.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Smith explained when Comstock first got on her radar, why she’s focusing on what antiabortion politicians are doing—not saying—and how her office plans to operate in an era where Republicans control the Senate, House, and White House.
Vanity Fair: I just wanted to start off by asking a bit about your Stop Comstock Act. Where does that bill stand going into 2025?
Tina Smith: So the Stop Comstock Act has about 22 cosponsors, all Democrats. We wanted to introduce that bill in order to draw attention to this old zombie law that we knew had the potential, in a Trump administration, of being the tool that they would use to deny people’s access to abortion care, even without any action from Congress. And so there it sits. Of course, there’s no chance of the Stop Comstock Act moving forward, given the change in power and given the Republicans’ control of the House and the Senate and the presidency. But I think these folks using that old zombie law would have a real impact on women’s lives.
I was hoping that you could respond to the news last week of Texas attorney general Ken Paxton suing a New York doctor for sending abortion pills into Texas—despite the shield laws that are in place to protect doctors sending pills across state lines.
This is a great example of how an antiabortion rights administration could use this old Comstock Act to affect the kind of health care that women are able to get in this country. This is exactly what we were afraid of. One thing we need to look at is how this new Justice Department could kind of weigh in on the side of Texas here. This is important, because I think there’s sort of this idea amongst policymakers, or amongst a lot of providers, that if you’re in a state where abortion rights have been protected, that you don’t in some way have to worry about what’s going to happen. But I think this Texas-New York case shows that that’s not, in fact, the case—that politicians in Texas can have a big impact on what providers in New York are able to do to help women.
Do you think it’s fair to say that you were not surprised—maybe disappointed?
Wasn’t surprised at all. I mean, I think this is the playbook of these folks. Just sort of stepping back for a minute, Donald Trump and Republicans won control of the House and the Senate and the presidency, yet we could see across the country that people voted for protecting people’s individual autonomy. And so now the question is, What is this administration going to do? And I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump figured out that taking away people’s health care and abortion access was very, very unpopular, and so he said a whole bunch of things during the campaign to try to cause people to feel safe in putting him into that office. Do I trust him? No. Am I going to do everything I can to hold him accountable and hold Republicans accountable? Absolutely.
You’ve been a senator since 2018, and so you worked in Congress while Donald Trump was president. I’m wondering how you’re preparing for his return and in what ways do you expect his second term to be different?
So in Donald Trump’s first term, he promised to get rid of Roe vs. Wade by appointing justices that would overturn it, and he did what he said, and we were unable to stop his judicial appointments from going through. We see he has dialed back his opposition to abortion rights because he can see that it’s unpopular, and that’s because we did so much work to help people understand what was at stake and to keep the pressure on him. He saw what happened in the ’22 elections. He saw that this was not a winning issue and so he dialed it back. So one of our biggest tools is going to be the kind of communications power, because we don’t have legislative power to do anything here.
The second thing I want to point out is that this is not just about Donald Trump. This is about Republicans that are going to be making decisions. They’re going to have power in the House and the Senate. So let’s watch to see who they put into these positions of real power and authority—what’s happening in the Department of Human Services, but also what’s happening in the Justice Department, who’s going to be leading FDA, who’s going to be leading the Center for Disease Control and the Drug Enforcement Administration, who’s going to be leading the post office, and how are they going to interpret Comstock in a new Trump administration?
Trump morphed his rhetoric around abortion during the campaign trail, including by distancing himself from Project 2025. Since becoming elected, he has switched, saying that he has since read it, and digs parts of it. I’m wondering, as he also goes on Meet the Press and speaks with Time magazine and says ‘I will protect abortion pills, but things could change in the future,’ do you put any weight into what he says about abortion access, and should everyday Americans? I know you already said that you don’t trust him.
I mean, he’ll say whatever he thinks he needs to say in the moment. I don’t really care about what he says; I care about what he does, and that’s why it’s important to pay attention to who he puts into these important decision-making roles. Take an example: During the campaign, he said that he’d never read Project 2025; he had no idea what was in it. He could see that it was very, very unpopular. And so he tries to distance himself from it. Why did that all happen? Because we said, ‘Look at what’s in Project 2025. Pay attention to this. This is his roadmap for a second administration.’ And then he had to back away from it. But what does he do? He puts one of the architects of Project 2025, [Russell Vought], in charge of one of the most powerful agencies in the federal government that nobody has ever heard of: the Office of Management and Budget. I mean, it all links back to—I shouldn’t say all—but much of it links back to Project 2025. Which, to be clear, laid out a road map for how a Trump administration could ban abortion without a single act of Congress by using the Comstock Act.
I watched the video that you did with the Abortion Access Front, where you debate the one and only Anthony Comstock, and you joke about how women can wear pants now and you jab at how antiquated this law is. Can you tell me about the push to get people to know more about this law?
So with that video, we wanted to find new avenues for communicating to people outside of the traditional political ways in which people get information. And I think that that is a road map for how we need to go forward. We know that most people are not getting their news in traditional ways. I mean, folks that are reading Vanity Fair, as an example, are not necessarily reading Vanity Fair because they want the most up-to-date on what’s happening in politics. They’re reading because they’re interested in what’s going on in life and culture and what’s new and what’s interesting. And so those kinds of ways of connecting with people about this issue are very, very interesting to me, and I think also really, really powerful, because it gets beyond sort of the Washington political drama and back into meeting people where they are in their lives. I mean, who’s waking up today and thinking about some law that some guy with sideburns down his face from 150 years ago—that what he thought about women is going to decide what health care they can get today? That’s crazy.
In that video. You say, “This weird law as written by this Victorian man baby could be used to ban not only access to abortion medication, tools, and information, but contraception … as well.” Currently, there are protections for birth control. But I wanted to ask you, if you find any sort of comfort in that, as some antiabortion politicians and groups have inaccurately referred to birth control as an abortifacient [something used to end a pregnancy].
So take this as an example of why I am deeply concerned about this. In the US House, there is the Life at Conception Act, which has 131 Republican cosponsors. If that bill were to become law, then that would decimate access to contraceptives, to birth control in this country. Another example: Since the mid-1970s the federal government has helped to make sure that all women have affordable access to birth control through a program called Title X; a Trump administration and Republicans in Congress can take all sorts of steps to gut that birth control program without ever saying up front that they’re opposed to birth control. You know, they could say that Planned Parenthood can’t get Title X funding. They could put gag rules on clinics that get Title X funding. They could figure out ways of siphoning off Title X funding to so-called crisis pregnancy centers that actually don’t provide birth control at all. They provide antiabortion propaganda.
There’s a post that you made on X recently, following Trump’s win, saying that the two things that you’re really going to be looking deeply at as he takes office is the Comstock Act and Title X funding. In 2019, the Trump admin implemented a new rule that barred any provider in the Title X network from so much as mentioning abortion care to patients, which led seven state governments and Planned Parenthood to drop out of this Title X network. I’m wondering, what can your office and Democrats do—and ought to be doing—to protect Title X funding? Is there an avenue there to protect it? Is there an avenue to protect where that money goes?
In the first Trump administration, when they changed how Title X funding could be distributed, and did this gag rule on Planned Parenthood, it meant [more than] 1,000 clinics around the country withdrew from Title X because they would not accept this gag rule. These are clinics that are supporting access to health care for millions of American women. What can we do to try to protect the integrity of this birth control access program that’s been around for decades and decades and decades? Well, we can fight their bad laws, we will use every legislative and rule tool that we have in the Senate and in the House to try to stop them from taking away access to birth control through Title X. We will try to draw attention to what they’re doing so they can’t have it both ways. They can’t say, ‘Oh, I support birth control’ on the one hand, while on the other hand, they’re actively trying to take it away from people. They have more votes than we do right now. So that gives them legislative power. We still have communications power. We still have organizing power.
You’re the only US senator to have ever worked at a Planned Parenthood. I’m curious how that experience informs the work you do today?
That experience roots me in what this really means for women going about their lives, right? When I worked at Planned Parenthood, I wasn’t a provider, but I worked in a clinic, and every single day I saw women of all different ages and backgrounds and men too, all different kinds of people walk through the doors of our clinic fully capable of making the very best decisions for themselves about their lives and their health care—they just needed access. And I also came to really understand, in a very direct way, that if you don’t have control over your reproductive life, you don’t have control over anything in your life.
Was it there or somewhere else, where Comstock first got on your radar?
I don’t remember specifically when Comstock first dawned on me, but I remember very clearly, even in my days at Planned Parenthood, and this was back in the early 2000s becoming aware of Comstock as this old law that was still sitting on the books. I mean, like, my little deep dive is when I first went to Planned Parenthood, I became very interested in the history of reproductive health care and abortion health care and this country, and found it just fascinating to think about how to kind of dive into that. It’s like a whole other—I won’t go down that rabbit hole.
It’s okay. We will gab about that for three hours later.
Super interesting. As I was looking at that history, I became aware of this Comstock law, and then, flash forward, I came to the Senate, and we were looking at what was happening with Trump and the Supreme Court. Then it was like, everything is going to go back to the States. Well, but, what is going on with medication abortion? What could the FDA do to interfere with how medication abortion is prescribed by providers? I said they would use Comstock as their justification for doing it. And a lot of people said, ‘Oh, don’t talk about that. We don’t want to talk about that. We don’t want to draw attention to it.’ And I’m like, ‘What? Like, do you think that the other side doesn’t know about this?’
You were raising alarms about Comstock and being met with either that might not happen or let’s not talk about it. Is there anything that you are thinking about right now that you feel like isn’t being talked about enough, or you think might be the next vanguard?
I think Republicans in this administration are going to try to reassure people that they’re protecting their rights on the one hand while they’re using their regulatory and administrative power on the other hand to strip those rights away. I doubt that we’re going to see this president do a full-frontal attack on abortion rights, because he can see it’s unpopular, but that doesn’t mean that he’s not going to also answer to the antiabortion folks in his big coalition who are looking for him to prove to them that he’s still on their side.
Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand is doing?
That’s exactly right. It’s like, over here, over here! Watch over here while I do what I really want to do over there. And that’s the thing that I’m the most concerned about, and so it’s our job to make sure that they don’t get away with that.
There’s been a lot of people, both online and not, making noise about what to do before Trump takes office. Should people be stockpiling pills? Should they be deleting period apps? I’m curious if and when a constituent came to you asking what they can do to protect themselves, what would you say?
I’m so aware that I am a legislator, not a doctor, and so my instinct is always to tell people to, when it comes to your health care, talk to people who are giving you advice about your health care and make sure that you’re taking care of yourself and do what you think you need to do to protect your options.
Even saying that I’m a legislator, not a doctor, is nuanced in this climate.
My whole reason for being here is to say that I shouldn’t be giving people advice about their health care. I should be making sure that they have the freedom to make their own decisions. Consult the people that are closest to you and make sure that you’re taking care of yourself. And the other thing that I would say is, just because you live in a state like Minnesota, my beloved state, which has done so much to protect people’s access to abortion and to health care, you can still be touched by what this president might do.
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