The Evangelical legalist apparatus is criminalizing medicine to kill women.
Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting this spring, declared that the distribution of mifepristone through the mail was, in his precise word, a “criminal enterprise.” Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting in the same case, accused the FDA of pursuing a “scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs.” What the dissents now name, with a precision that should chill, is Operation Comstock — the apparatus’s escalating effort to revive the Comstock Act of 1873, a Victorian-era obscenity statute passed to suppress pornography and information about contraception in the age of Ulysses S. Grant, as the operative federal instrument for banning medication abortion in the year 2026. This was not a fringe position smuggled in through a back-door concurrence. It was a sitting Supreme Court majority-in-waiting, on the record, asserting that an act of Congress passed the year before the telephone was invented should govern the FDA-approved drug a pregnant woman and her physician have decided, in counsel together, is the right medication for her situation.
That is the state of the union four years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Alito wrote then that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” He promised the decision would return the issue to the people and calm the debate. It did not calm debate. It did not heal division. Instead, the apparatus has escalated into a shadow war on the Postal Service, the FDA, and any physician who tries to practice medicine on a woman whose body is failing.
Let me show you what the operation is doing. The Comstock Act, in the language Thomas cited, prohibits mailing “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” Read the statute as written, the Act does not regulate abortion — it abolishes it, by criminalizing the channel. Texas has added a $100,000 private right of action for citizens to sue out-of-state prescribers. Louisiana has scheduled mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances and is suing the FDA to revoke the rules that permitted telemedicine prescribing. Nebraska prosecutors have already built a felony case out of a mother and daughter’s Facebook messages. The next frontier is the period-tracking app. Bills in other states would charge women who obtain abortions with homicide. The legalist machine is treating the United States Mail and the American Pharmacopoeia as enemies of the state because the mail and the pharmacopoeia are keeping women alive. The operation has decided that state-by-state is not fast enough.
Now let me show you what the Bible actually says.
The legalist machinery claims an unbroken theological foundation for its project: an ontological absolute of personhood from conception, traced from the Didache through Augustine and Aquinas. But strip away two millennia of apologetic gloss and read the actual statutory law of the tradition they claim to revere. Read Exodus 21:22–25 in plain English. A man strikes a pregnant woman, and she gives birth prematurely or miscarries. If there is no serious injury to the woman, the offender is fined. If there is serious injury to the woman — life for life, eye for eye. The Torah itself explicitly distinguishes between the loss of a pregnancy and the murder of a woman. The fine is for the fetal loss; the capital penalty is for the woman. The biblical text does not equate the two. The Evangelical apparatus did. They elevated a later dogmatic construction over the explicit statutory law of their own tradition, and then they built a legal architecture on that inversion.
And read the red letters. Matthew 23:4 — Jesus speaking, the woes against the scribes and Pharisees: “They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” The Greek is desmeuousin — to bind, to put in chains. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were the most biblically literate people in the country, and Jesus reserved His sharpest words for them, not for the Romans occupying the country. The scholars had bound the law into a system of burdens the ordinary Israelite could not bear without crushing, and the scholars had exempted themselves from the same system. They had the truth of the Torah and they were using it as a bludgeon. Read the verse and the next sixteen, all the way through Matthew 23. There is no version of this passage that praises the legal expert who loads the burdens.
The red letters, in John 8:1–11, tell the story of a woman caught in adultery — the operation’s reading would criminalize her; the text’s reading says “let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The Magnificat, in Luke 1:46–55, says Mary understood her pregnancy as the occasion for the overturning of thrones and the filling of the hungry with good things — not as the occasion for criminal prosecution of pregnant women, not as the occasion for a nineteenth-century vice law to be dusted off and deployed by judicial fiat. The Sermon on the Mount says blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart — there is no beatitude for the lawyer who finds a 153-year-old obscenity statute and deploys it against the FDA.
The Bible the operation cites does not say what the operation claims it says. The Bible the operation cites, in its plain language, condemns the operation.
The cost of that condemnation is no longer abstract. It is measured in the bodies of the women sitting in your pews. When the legalist apparatus stripped away the constitutional floor, it did not produce a culture of life; it produced a culture of medical terror. We saw it in Texas in December 2023 with Kate Cox, whose pregnancy was killing her and whose fetus had no chance of survival, while the Texas Supreme Court debated the legality of her doctor providing care. We saw it with Samantha Casiano, who carried Baby Halo for months knowing her daughter would not survive, before testifying in court and letting a documentary crew into her daughter’s funeral. We saw it in Georgia in 2025 with Adriana Smith, a thirty-year-old nurse declared brain-dead at nine weeks pregnant, kept on a ventilator for over ninety days because the state’s fetal-personhood law treated her corpse as an incubator. We see it every week in emergency rooms where doctors are forced to wait until a woman is sick enough to meet the legal definition of “dying” before they can manage an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage.
The apparatus is now expanding its war because the medicine is outpacing the theology. U.S. abortions have nearly doubled since Dobbs, fueled by telehealth pills. The legalists have realized that women are simply bypassing the brick-and-mortar clinics they tried to regulate out of existence. So the apparatus has pivoted to the mail and the pharmacy. They do so not because they have discovered a new pro-life ethic, but because telemedicine and shield laws have exposed the fatal flaw in their theological project: women will use medicine to survive when the law demands they die for a poetry reading.
The Apostle Paul, whom the legalists love to quote on order and submission, actually named this exact dynamic two thousand years ago. Romans 7:10: “The very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death to me.” The law, when weaponized by sinful human machinery, becomes the instrument of death. The Evangelical legalist apparatus has taken the commandment to protect life and forged it into the very instrument that is killing pregnant women.
There is a profound cruelty in demanding that the women in your congregation choose between their faith and their physicians. There is a deeper cruelty in demanding they choose between their lives and a Victorian postal statute. The Comstock Act was the product of Anthony Comstock’s particular moral crusade, and the moral crusade has aged about as well as the moral crusades of the 1870s tend to. The Act was largely dormant by the time the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000. The current operation is resurrecting it — citing the Bible, the protection of the unborn, the sanctity of life. None of these citations bear the weight the operation places on them. The Comstock Act is the Comstock Act. The imago Dei is the imago Dei. The Comstock Act is not the imago Dei. The operation is not going to get the moral authority of the second by the legal mechanism of the first.
The same shape of operation appears on the other side of the political aisle. When a Democratic legislature shields an out-of-state prescriber from civil suit on a theory of interstate medical practice the legislature knows would not survive review, the same operation is running — legal mechanism in one hand, moral language in the other, conflated. The test is not who runs it. The test is whether the legal mechanism requires the moral authority the operation claims, or whether the legal mechanism and the moral authority are doing separate work the operation is conflating. I am as allergic to the conflation on the left as I am on the right. I name it. The captured operation on the right is doing this on a national scale, and so this is the column.
The data point that should give every honest operator pause: the number of abortions in states with bans has increased each year since Dobbs, driven by the shield laws and the telemedicine infrastructure the operation is now trying to dismantle. The empirical reality on the four-year anniversary of Dobbs demonstrates, plainly, the operation’s failure — women are getting abortions at higher rates, in higher numbers, in states that have banned the procedure, because the operation’s legal architecture is being routed around faster than the operation can build it. As Elisa Wells of Plan C told NPR, “The genie is out of the bottle.” The operation is losing the empirical contest and reaching, increasingly, for the strangest legal instruments it can find — an 1873 vice law, a controlled-substance scheduling of two FDA-approved drugs, a private right of action against prescribers in other states. The instruments are strange because the political mechanism — direct federal legislation — would not pass. The operation is doing what the operation always does, in this space: it is reaching for what works in court because what works at the ballot box has not been available.
There is a cruelty in this that the apparatus cannot admit. The regime it built has given women more privacy than Roe ever did. Researchers at UCSF are studying over-the-counter access; Planned Parenthood is advance-provisioning pills to non-pregnant patients. The clinic the apparatus destroyed is being replaced by a mailbox it cannot regulate, and the Book that claims to hold the words of life is being used to legislate death.
I want to say one more thing, to the reader in the pew. The Bible the operation cites is the same Bible I am citing here. The reader who tithes to the operation, the reader whose Sunday school class skipped Matthew 23, the reader who has wondered why the lesson plan never got to the woes — that reader is being addressed. I am not the outside critic. I am not making this up. The text says what the text says.
I love this tradition. I am still here. And I am telling you, with chapter and verse, that the Comstock Act is not the Gospel. The operation is using one and claiming the authority of the other, and the text itself — the actual text, in the actual chapters and verses — will not support the operation’s claim. Take the text home. Read Matthew 23 in your Bible tonight. Read Luke 1. Read John 8. The text will tell you what the text says, and what the text says is not what the operation is doing. The text has not changed. The operation has.# The Evangelical Legalists Are Criminalizing Medicine To Kill Women
The Evangelical legalist apparatus is criminalizing medicine to kill women.
Justice Clarence Thomas, dissenting this spring, declared that the distribution of mifepristone through the mail was, in his precise word, a “criminal enterprise.” Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting in the same case, accused the FDA of pursuing a “scheme to undermine our decision in Dobbs.” What the dissents now name, with a precision that should chill, is Operation Comstock — the apparatus’s escalating effort to revive the Comstock Act of 1873, a Victorian-era obscenity statute passed to suppress pornography and information about contraception in the age of Ulysses S. Grant, as the operative federal instrument for banning medication abortion in the year 2026. This was not a fringe position smuggled in through a back-door concurrence. It was a sitting Supreme Court majority-in-waiting, on the record, asserting that an act of Congress passed the year before the telephone was invented should govern the FDA-approved drug a pregnant woman and her physician have decided, in counsel together, is the right medication for her situation.
That is the state of the union four years after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Alito wrote then that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.” He promised the decision would return the issue to the people and calm the debate. It did not calm debate. It did not heal division. Instead, the apparatus has escalated into a shadow war on the Postal Service, the FDA, and any physician who tries to practice medicine on a woman whose body is failing.
Let me show you what the operation is doing. The Comstock Act, in the language Thomas cited, prohibits mailing “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” Read the statute as written, the Act does not regulate abortion — it abolishes it, by criminalizing the channel. Texas has added a $100,000 private right of action for citizens to sue out-of-state prescribers. Louisiana has scheduled mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances and is suing the FDA to revoke the rules that permitted telemedicine prescribing. Nebraska prosecutors have already built a felony case out of a mother and daughter’s Facebook messages. The next frontier is the period-tracking app. Bills in other states would charge women who obtain abortions with homicide. The legalist machine is treating the United States Mail and the American Pharmacopoeia as enemies of the state because the mail and the pharmacopoeia are keeping women alive. The operation has decided that state-by-state is not fast enough.
Now let me show you what the Bible actually says.
The legalist machinery claims an unbroken theological foundation for its project: an ontological absolute of personhood from conception, traced from the Didache through Augustine and Aquinas. But strip away two millennia of apologetic gloss and read the actual statutory law of the tradition they claim to revere. Read Exodus 21:22–25 in plain English. A man strikes a pregnant woman, and she gives birth prematurely or miscarries. If there is no serious injury to the woman, the offender is fined. If there is serious injury to the woman — life for life, eye for eye. The Torah itself explicitly distinguishes between the loss of a pregnancy and the murder of a woman. The fine is for the fetal loss; the capital penalty is for the woman. The biblical text does not equate the two. The Evangelical apparatus did. They elevated a later dogmatic construction over the explicit statutory law of their own tradition, and then they built a legal architecture on that inversion.
And read the red letters. Matthew 23:4 — Jesus speaking, the woes against the scribes and Pharisees: “They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” The Greek is desmeuousin — to bind, to put in chains. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were the most biblically literate people in the country, and Jesus reserved His sharpest words for them, not for the Romans occupying the country. The scholars had bound the law into a system of burdens the ordinary Israelite could not bear without crushing, and the scholars had exempted themselves from the same system. They had the truth of the Torah and they were using it as a bludgeon. Read the verse and the next sixteen, all the way through Matthew 23. There is no version of this passage that praises the legal expert who loads the burdens.
The red letters, in John 8:1–11, tell the story of a woman caught in adultery — the operation’s reading would criminalize her; the text’s reading says “let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” The Magnificat, in Luke 1:46–55, says Mary understood her pregnancy as the occasion for the overturning of thrones and the filling of the hungry with good things — not as the occasion for criminal prosecution of pregnant women, not as the occasion for a nineteenth-century vice law to be dusted off and deployed by judicial fiat. The Sermon on the Mount says blessed are the meek, blessed are the merciful, blessed are the pure in heart — there is no beatitude for the lawyer who finds a 153-year-old obscenity statute and deploys it against the FDA.
The Bible the operation cites does not say what the operation claims it says. The Bible the operation cites, in its plain language, condemns the operation.
The cost of that condemnation is no longer abstract. It is measured in the bodies of the women sitting in your pews. When the legalist apparatus stripped away the constitutional floor, it did not produce a culture of life; it produced a culture of medical terror. We saw it in Texas in December 2023 with Kate Cox, whose pregnancy was killing her and whose fetus had no chance of survival, while the Texas Supreme Court debated the legality of her doctor providing care. We saw it with Samantha Casiano, who carried Baby Halo for months knowing her daughter would not survive, before testifying in court and letting a documentary crew into her daughter’s funeral. We saw it in Georgia in 2025 with Adriana Smith, a thirty-year-old nurse declared brain-dead at nine weeks pregnant, kept on a ventilator for over ninety days because the state’s fetal-personhood law treated her corpse as an incubator. We see it every week in emergency rooms where doctors are forced to wait until a woman is sick enough to meet the legal definition of “dying” before they can manage an ectopic pregnancy or a miscarriage.
The apparatus is now expanding its war because the medicine is outpacing the theology. U.S. abortions have nearly doubled since Dobbs, fueled by telehealth pills. The legalists have realized that women are simply bypassing the brick-and-mortar clinics they tried to regulate out of existence. So the apparatus has pivoted to the mail and the pharmacy. They do so not because they have discovered a new pro-life ethic, but because telemedicine and shield laws have exposed the fatal flaw in their theological project: women will use medicine to survive when the law demands they die for a poetry reading.
The Apostle Paul, whom the legalists love to quote on order and submission, actually named this exact dynamic two thousand years ago. Romans 7:10: “The very commandment that was intended to bring life actually brought death to me.” The law, when weaponized by sinful human machinery, becomes the instrument of death. The Evangelical legalist apparatus has taken the commandment to protect life and forged it into the very instrument that is killing pregnant women.
There is a profound cruelty in demanding that the women in your congregation choose between their faith and their physicians. There is a deeper cruelty in demanding they choose between their lives and a Victorian postal statute. The Comstock Act was the product of Anthony Comstock’s particular moral crusade, and the moral crusade has aged about as well as the moral crusades of the 1870s tend to. The Act was largely dormant by the time the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000. The current operation is resurrecting it — citing the Bible, the protection of the unborn, the sanctity of life. None of these citations bear the weight the operation places on them. The Comstock Act is the Comstock Act. The imago Dei is the imago Dei. The Comstock Act is not the imago Dei. The operation is not going to get the moral authority of the second by the legal mechanism of the first.
The same shape of operation appears on the other side of the political aisle. When a Democratic legislature shields an out-of-state prescriber from civil suit on a theory of interstate medical practice the legislature knows would not survive review, the same operation is running — legal mechanism in one hand, moral language in the other, conflated. The test is not who runs it. The test is whether the legal mechanism requires the moral authority the operation claims, or whether the legal mechanism and the moral authority are doing separate work the operation is conflating. I am as allergic to the conflation on the left as I am on the right. I name it. The captured operation on the right is doing this on a national scale, and so this is the column.
The data point that should give every honest operator pause: the number of abortions in states with bans has increased each year since Dobbs, driven by the shield laws and the telemedicine infrastructure the operation is now trying to dismantle. The empirical reality on the four-year anniversary of Dobbs demonstrates, plainly, the operation’s failure — women are getting abortions at higher rates, in higher numbers, in states that have banned the procedure, because the operation’s legal architecture is being routed around faster than the operation can build it. As Elisa Wells of Plan C told NPR, “The genie is out of the bottle.” The operation is losing the empirical contest and reaching, increasingly, for the strangest legal instruments it can find — an 1873 vice law, a controlled-substance scheduling of two FDA-approved drugs, a private right of action against prescribers in other states. The instruments are strange because the political mechanism — direct federal legislation — would not pass. The operation is doing what the operation always does, in this space: it is reaching for what works in court because what works at the ballot box has not been available.
There is a cruelty in this that the apparatus cannot admit. The regime it built has given women more privacy than Roe ever did. Researchers at UCSF are studying over-the-counter access; Planned Parenthood is advance-provisioning pills to non-pregnant patients. The clinic the apparatus destroyed is being replaced by a mailbox it cannot regulate, and the Book that claims to hold the words of life is being used to legislate death.
I want to say one more thing, to the reader in the pew. The Bible the operation cites is the same Bible I am citing here. The reader who tithes to the operation, the reader whose Sunday school class skipped Matthew 23, the reader who has wondered why the lesson plan never got to the woes — that reader is being addressed. I am not the outside critic. I am not making this up. The text says what the text says.
I love this tradition. I am still here. And I am telling you, with chapter and verse, that the Comstock Act is not the Gospel. The operation is using one and claiming the authority of the other, and the text itself — the actual text, in the actual chapters and verses — will not support the operation’s claim. Take the text home. Read Matthew 23 in your Bible tonight. Read Luke 1. Read John 8. The text will tell you what the text says, and what the text says is not what the operation is doing. The text has not changed. The operation has.