What to know about the return of archaic abortion bills

Archaic pieces of legislation are coming back to life as the fight over abortion access rages across the country ahead of November’s elections.

When the Arizona Supreme Court ruled to ban nearly all abortions in the state, it did so by upholding an 1864 law — passed before Arizona was made a state — that made performing abortions a felony.

There are at least five other states that have similar so-called “zombie laws” on the books, which could be used to restrict or ban abortions entirely.

And anti-abortion groups have made the Comstock Act of 1873 a central part of their push to ban mifepristone, a drug used for medical abortions, being sent through the mail.

These long-dormant laws were revived by the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022, which overturned a constitutional right to abortion that had stood for almost 50 years.

That ruling was the fruit of a decades-long conservative push to overturn Roe v. Wade, and was made possible after former President Trump appointed three new justices to the court.

However, the zombie laws have become a political liability for Republicans, who are backing away from hard-line abortion positions that are widely unpopular with voters.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas and West Virginia all have total or near-total abortion bans that were passed several generations ago. Four of these bans were passed in the 1800s, and Texas’s ban was passed in 1925.

All five of these states have banned all abortions with limited exceptions since the Dobbs decision.