I’m blood-related to the man who wrote America’s first federal ban on contraceptives.

I am blood-related to the man who created the first federal ban on contraceptives in the United States.

My relative Anthony Comstock wrote the Comstock Act in 1873. Anthony, whose own diaries reveal he spent his youth tormented by, and losing to, the very vice he'd later dedicate his life to policing, decided that information about contraception and abortion was "obscene" and should be illegal to mail. And Congress agreed with him.

The law made it a federal crime to send anything "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" through the mail, and Anthony got to decide what qualified. That net was cast wide enough to catch contraceptives, anything that could end a pregnancy, and, most chillingly, information about either one. A pamphlet explaining birth control was contraband. A physician mailing a diaphragm was a criminal. And Congress didn't just pass his bill, they pinned a badge on him and made him a special agent of the U.S. Post Office, so the man who wrote the country's morality code also got to hunt down anyone who broke it. Violators faced years in prison.

Over four decades, Anthony was responsible for the arrest of more than 3,600 men, women, and children. He entrapped people by writing them letters posing as a woman in distress, then arrested them the moment they mailed anything back. When Madame Restell, a prominent provider, slit her own throat the morning of her trial, he bragged that she was the fifteenth person he'd driven to suicide.

The Comstock Act was never actually repealed. It was only defanged, one Supreme Court ruling at a time. Congress carved out contraception in 1971. Roe and the privacy rulings buried the rest. For decades it sat on the books, unenforced, a "zombie law." Then Dobbs overturned Roe in 2022 and dug it back up. Now anti-abortion strategists, including the authors of Project 2025, argue that this 150-year-old text already bans mailing mifepristone nationwide... no new vote from Congress required. In May 2026, when the Supreme Court let telehealth abortion pills keep moving through the mail, Justices Thomas and Alito dissented, and Thomas invoked Anthony's law by name. Nearly 60% of abortions in this country are now medication abortions. My ancestor's pet project is one court ruling away from becoming a backdoor national ban.

A woman's right to choose has always been the center of my mission. The first march I ever went to as a child was a Bans Off Our Bodies march. In college, I was assistant director of the Gender Equity Committee at the UC Berkeley ACLU chapter before being elected director of public relations. The first politician I ever met was Kamala Harris, at a reproductive freedom talk with her and Chrissy Teigen. Now, I get millions of views every month making pro-choice discourse videos.

And I hope Anthony Comstock keeps rotting in hell while I keep fighting for reproductive rights for women everywhere.