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In 1873, Congress passed the Comstock Act, which made it a federal crime to import or transport in interstate commerce virtually any information about contraception or abortion.
The Supreme Court’s decisions in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade effectively rendered the criminal prohibitions on distributing information about abortion and contraception a nullity, though those provisions were never repealed.
Today, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1461 and 1462 still reflect these (defunct) provisions banning the importation, transportation, or mailing of even truthful information about abortion or contraception.
And Title 18 of the U.S. Code contains just two other criminal provisions mentioning abortion: the federal ban on partial-birth abortions found in Section 1531 and Section 248’s prohibition on impeding access to clinics providing reproductive health services.
