Censoring abortion is an attempt to prevent and reverse social change
Hysterical claims about the supposed social harms caused by targeted materials have conjoined censorship movements in American history
☆This post is Part III in a series examining the anti-choice movement’s authoritarian efforts and actions toward censoring information about abortion and abortion services.
Scholars have identified several historical tenets of censorship. As we have already discussed, four of these historical tenets are especially elucidative of current anti-choice actions and efforts, and provide insight into the anti-choice movement, its activists, and its adherents. These tenets are:
Censorship Is an Attempt to Prevent Social Change
Censorship Targets Access to Impactful Materials
Censorship Is Ultimately Driven by Fear
IN THIS POST, we will explore the second historical tenet of censorship and what it tells us about the anti-reproductive-rights movement. In so doing, we arm ourselves with the necessary knowledge and vocabulary needed to critique, counteract, and undermine the movement’s authoritarian goals of weakening free speech protections and colonizing both our bodies and our minds.
Tenet II: Censorship Is an Attempt to Prevent Social Change.
The second historical tenet of censorship is that censorship is an attempt to prevent social change.
“Censorship is an act of control, driven by a combustible mix of power, privilege, and fear.”1 Censorship campaigns “occur in response to social changes that alarm a privileged population, with the goal of dictating access to information for the entire community according to the personal beliefs of the privileged group. The urge to censor is rooted in the use of raw power to preserve the currently privileged.”2 Censors try to use this raw power to “impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else.”3
Detailed studies show that censorship movements arise in opposition to social change, with censors often “framing their activities in terms of defending society from some form of moral decline. This defense against moral decline, however, is simply packaging a resistance to change or the expansion of rights to others under a different guise. Those launching this defense generally stand to benefit the most.”4
“When the status quo is threatened, the existing power always attempts to prevent the spread of opinions and attitudes hostile to those it holds sacred.”5 Hence, censorship is instituted to “uphold the rights and values of some and deny the rights and values of others,”6 in an attempt to prevent social change and to arrest efforts to extend full rights to disfavored others.
“Hysterical claims about the [supposed] social harm caused by the banned materials have likewise conjoined censorship movements in American history.”7 While the hysterical rhetoric of the censors focuses on protecting children (or women and children), the goal is to further marginalize already marginalized groups and preserve the hegemonic status of the currently privileged.8
The Puritans, for example, were feverishly obsessed with preventing social change and doggedly opposed to extending rights to non-White, non-male, non-Puritan people and groups.
After immigrating to North America and establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans “imposed their own strict form of censorship, allowing religious liberty only for themselves and harshly punishing dissenters. Those who challenged the Puritan establishment, like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, faced banishment, while Quakers encountered severe penalties, including execution.”9
The Puritans “regarded art and literature as competing with the Bible for the hearts and souls of Puritan parishioners,” and “[h]uman creativity among commoners” and laypersons was “viewed as highly suspicious, even satanic, and deserving of extreme punishments.”10
It should come as no surprise, then, that the very first book that was banned in what is now America was banned by the fiercely intolerant Puritans.
That book, New English Canaan (1637), written by Thomas Morton, “mounted a harsh [] critique of Puritan customs and power structures” in the Massachusetts Colony.11 “A first edition of Morton’s tell-all… compared[] the Puritan leadership to crustaceans.”12 — So, they banned it.
Perhaps no censorship effort in American history better illustrates the historical tenet that censorship is an attempt to prevent social change than the that of America’s most notorious censor: Anthony Comstock. America’s most powerful and puritanical prude, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) was an anti-vice crusader dedicated to imposing his own rigid idea of Christian morality upon American society by convincing Congress to pass what is now known as the Comstock Act (18 USC 1461 and 18 USC 1462).
“In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Anthony Comstock was the official censor of the US government, working through a position in the Postal Service. His job was to stop the flow of the ‘obscene,’ ‘immoral,’ ‘explicit,’ and ‘indecent.’”13 The law itself did not define obscenity— Anthony Comstock did, and he used his position as a special agent of the U.S. Postal Service, “with broad powers to police the mails,” to severely enforce the law.14 This included a total ban on “writings or instruments pertaining to contraception and abortion, even if written by a physician.”15
Anthony Comstock's campaign of censorship came to be known as Comstockery, and he later “boasted that in his lifetime he seized 150 tons of books, made 4,000 arrests, and drove 15 people to suicide.”16 A real swell guy.
“Comstock’s role [as America’s official censor] was a reaction to increasing freedom for women in society and campaigns for women’s suffrage and other human rights” (emphasis added).17
Like today’s anti-reproductive-rights movement, “Comstock primarily focused on materials written by and for women – medical materials for women, women’s fiction, materials related to women’s rights – and the contraceptive devices and medicines that gave women greater autonomy over their own bodies” (emphasis added).18 “Among the prominent people he hounded into suicide were female medical practitioners focused on women’s health and well-known advocates for women’s rights, most notably Ida Craddock and Ann Lohman.”19
In Comstock’s time, other crusading puritanical prudes “tried to apply his methods to the passage of [state] felony laws regarding women’s fashion, attempting to make the possession of a pair of high heels worthy of a year of imprisonment in multiple states.”20 — Such laws were the modified revivification of a law in the Puritan-controlled Massachusetts Colony of the 17th century. “The Puritans believed [high-heeled] shoes to be seductive and possibly an instrument of witchcraft.”21 As such, “any woman found wearing heels to ‘ensnare’ a man would be tried as a witch.”22
Another puritanical crusader during the Comstock era was a minister named Washington Gladden who published a widely distributed pamphlet filled with hysterical claims. The pamphlet decried “books that gave women any sense of empowerment or rights or identity outside of domesticity, claiming that such literature ‘takes away all relish from the realities of life, breeds discontent and indolence and selfishness’ and ultimately makes a woman ‘a weak, frivolous, petulant, miserable being.’”23
“The impacts of Comstock’s campaign are incalculable, as he was the first to realize ‘that citizens and societies of organized citizens might function as aggressive vigilance groups that directed attention of authorities and, moreover, could and should lobby lawmakers for strong laws governing personal and social behavior.’ This is the playbook in use by today’s censorship movement” (emphasis added).24
Anti-choice Censorship Is an Attempt to Prevent Social Change
Like Comstockery, anti-reproductive-rights censorship is a reaction to the rights of and freedom for women in society that have been attained by the several waves of feminism in America, and a reaction to current efforts to exercise and to secure sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR). In other words, anti-choice censorship is an attempt to prevent, and even to reverse, social change.
“Intellectual freedom gives people the right to think for themselves. It respects individual dignity and self-rule,”25 to which the anti-reproductive-rights movement is resoundingly opposed.
In attempting to restrict the public's access to information and ideas, opponents of sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR) hope to control public perception and stifle any societal shifts in beliefs and attitudes that could lead to broader social change and threaten the currently privileged group's stranglehold on power.
Their censorship rhetoric focuses on defending and protecting women and children.
Their goal is social control.
The following examples of the anti-reproductive-rights movement’s attempts to impose censorship upon the broader community “[a]rise from a view that our national tradition of free expression is no longer valid; that censorship and suppression are needed to counter threats to” the status quo, “as well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals.”26
Faux Chivalry
“[C]riminalizing abortion is first and foremost about obedience, about creating docile people and bodies, and enshrining the ability to control people's bodies as property of the state.”27 Abortion opponents rue the disobedience that pregnant people have demonstrated in refusing to submit their bodies and futures to the hegemonic powers that be, and the disobedience of the post-Dobbs network of helpers and providers in continuing to aid the pregnant citizens of the hegemonic states.
Frustrated that they have been unable to return the state of abortion access to the old status quo of primarily bricks-and-mortar clinics, and frustrated by their own inability thus far to arrest the post-Dobbs expansion of access to medication abortion, opponents of sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR) are increasingly attempting to institute and justify authoritarian censorship.
In this vein, Texas Republican state senator, Bryan Hughes, introduced Senate Bill 2880, which we discussed in Part I of this series.
Consider the cloyingly sentimental, paternalistic rhetoric used by Hughes as he attempted to frame his bill's hegemonic censorship of online information about medication abortion as a necessary act of defence and protection. Hughes said:
“Those little unborn babies and those moms — who’ve been lied to, who haven’t been told the truth, who are scared and alone dealing with these pills in most cases — they need someone to protect them[] when they can’t.”28
Notice, there is no room in Hughes's assertion here for pregnant people’s moral and intellectual agency. Nor is there room for respect or recognition of individual dignity and self-rule.
Hughes frames his desire to shred First Amendment jurisprudence through authoritarian censorship of online speech and online access to information about medication abortion as a necessary social good, a chivalrous act of defending helpless, infantilized women and children from the harms of moral decline - the particular moral decline here being women exercising bodily autonomy and access to the online information that ultimately enables women to do so.
This defense against moral decline, however, is merely the repackaging of anti-choice resistance to social change and women's right of self-determination under a guise of protection and concern. The true purpose of Hughes's bill is to “uphold the rights and values of some and deny the rights and values of others.”29
Anti-Choice Book Burners
Consider also a recent piece at the rabbid anti-choice organization Live Action celebrating a punitory censorship bill (SB 412) that was recently passed in Texas. The bill criminalizes parents, teachers, librarians, and medical professionals if they provide information or materials (like books) to children that the censorious mob deems “obscene.” Because God forbid parents teach their kids about ‘the birds and the bees’ using a book!
In the piece, Live Action makes hysterical claims about the imagined harms of literature disfavored by the berserk, frenzied, screeching hegemons:
“Many of these explicit books and materials not only graphically detail and encourage casual sex, incest, rape, and murder… but also promote abortions.”30
[Now, I don't know about you, but I've never come across anything like Billy Butchers Mommy and You Should Too or Sally Does Her Sister in the children's book section. Honestly, what are these people smoking?]
Perhaps subconsciously aware of the tyrannical nature and unpopularity of advocating for allowing a privileged, powerful, and puritanical minority to dictate every parent's book choices, the author of the Live Action piece attempts to further justify her support for such a dictatorial position by outlandishly accusing the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Library Association of “promoting[] sexually explicit books” to little kids.
Assisting the contemporary book burners is none other than Jonathan Mitchell, the Texas attorney behind Texas’s bounty hunter abortion ban that gives private citizens the right to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ an abortion.”31 “Mitchell is now applying the same novel legal mechanisms to book bans.”32
“While censorship rhetoric focuses on protecting children from ‘explicit’ materials, the examples given by censorship enthusiasts fall heavily on books by” authors who are non-White, LGBT+, or Jewish.33 In fact, “[i]n the state legislatures that have debated statewide book bans or laws criminalizing librarianship for providing access to banned books, members have not attempted to disguise that their goals truly are to further marginalize the voices of BIPOC,34 LGBTQIA+,35 and Jewish communities.”36
Like Comstock, these censors also focus their efforts against materials written by and for women, especially materials about reproductive health, women’s rights, feminism, and autonomy.37
With hysterical claims, scary words, and conspiracies, the anti-choice, censorious parade of prudes, bigots, and whackos in the examples discussed above, frame their censorship campaign “in terms of defending society from some form of moral decline” and focus their rhetoric on protecting children (or women and children). “This defense against moral decline, however, is simply packaging a resistance to change or the expansion of rights to others under a different guise. Those launching this defense generally stand to benefit the most from a rigid adherence to the status quo.”38
Their goal is social control: to “uphold the rights and values of some and deny the rights and values of others”; to the further marginalize already marginalized groups; and to preserve of the hegemonic status of the currently privileged.39
In sum:
Like Comstockery, anti-reproductive-rights censorship is a hegemonic reaction to the rights of and freedom for women in society that have been attained by the several waves of feminism in America, and a reaction to current efforts to exercise and to secure sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR).
■ To prevent and reverse social change, anti-choice hegemons frame their authoritarian censorship activities in terms of defending children, women, or society from some form of threat of moral decline.
Anti-choice hegemons stand to gain the most by this framing.
■ To prevent and reverse social change, anti-choice hegemons repackage their censorious resistance to equality, to equity, and to the full expansion of rights to disfavored groups under the guise of defending children, women, or society from some form of moral threat.
Anti-choice hegemons stand to gain the most by launching this deceptive defense.
■ To prevent and reverse social change, anti-choice hegemons frame censorship as a necessary action to protect society by making hysterical claims about the social harms supposedly caused by the material that the hegemons intend to ban.
Anti-choice hegemons stand to gain the most by these hysterical claims.
■ While the rhetoric of the authoritarian, anti-choice censors focuses on protecting children or another group, the goal of their censorship campaign is to prevent, and even reverse, social change; to further marginalize and isolate already marginalized groups; to maintain inequality and sustain social, cultural, economic, and religious hierarchies; and to preserve their own hegemonic power, privilege, and control.
In essence, authoritarian opponents of sexual and reproductive health and human rights (SRHR) long for nothing less than a return to the glory days of a fictitious past— a mythical time when they exercised unchallenged dominion over the rest of us and the sun only shined on the worthy.■
Jaeger”
Feminism 101. Red Letter Press. (2007, August 27). https://redletterpress.org/feminism101.shtml
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Young, K. (2007). KMBALL Young: Social Psychology: Chapter 26: Censorship: The negative control of opinion. Brock University. https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Young/1930/1930_26.html
Gorlewski, J. (2023, November 14). Censorship hinders critical thinking and infringes on readers’ rights. Learn Magazine - University at Buffalo. https://ed.buffalo.edu/magazine/issues/fall-2023/censorship.html
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
EBSCO. (2025). Puritans and censorship: EBSCO. EBSCO Information Services, Inc. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/puritans-and-censorship
Clausen, D. M. (2022, June 29). The Puritans are back: Did they ever leave?. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/small-town-usa/202206/the-puritans-are-back-did-they-ever-leave
Taub, M. (2019, November 1). America’s First Banned Book Really Ticked Off the Plymouth Puritans. Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/americas-first-banned-book
Taub, M. (2019, November 1). America’s First Banned Book Really Ticked Off the Plymouth Puritans. Atlas Obscura. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/americas-first-banned-book
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
National Archives and Records Administration. (2023, March 2). Featured document display: Vicecapades: 150th anniversary of the 1873 comstock act. National Archives and Records Administration. https://museum.archives.gov/featured-document-display-vicecapades-150th-anniversary-1873-comstock-act
Burnette, B. R. (2024, February 19). Comstock Act of 1873 (1873). The Free Speech Center. https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/comstock-act-of-1873/
National Archives and Records Administration. (2023, March 2). Featured document display: Vicecapades: 150th anniversary of the 1873 comstock act. National Archives and Records Administration. https://museum.archives.gov/featured-document-display-vicecapades-150th-anniversary-1873-comstock-act
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Suthers, C. (2024, September 4). 9 ridiculously sexist laws I learned about this week that literally made my blood boil. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/carleysuthers/weird-sexist-laws-to-control-women?origin=microsoft
Suthers, C. (2024, September 4). 9 ridiculously sexist laws I learned about this week that literally made my blood boil. BuzzFeed. https://www.buzzfeed.com/carleysuthers/weird-sexist-laws-to-control-women?origin=microsoft
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
American Library Association. (n.d.). Intellectual freedom and censorship Q & A. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/censorship/faq
American Library Association. (n.d.-b). The freedom to read statement. https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/freedomreadstatement
Brown, S. J. (2024, November 21). Criminalizing abortion isn’t just about controlling “women’s bodies.” Prism. https://prismreports.org/2022/05/04/criminalizing-abortion-reproductive-justice/#:~:text=But%20criminalizing%20abortion%20is%20first,as%20property%20of%20the%20state
McCaskill, N. D. (2025, May 5). A ban on abortion pills recently passed the Texas Senate. here’s how it would work. The Dallas Morning News. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2025/05/02/a-ban-on-abortion-pills-recently-passed-the-texas-senate-heres-how-it-would-work/
Gorlewski, J. (2023, November 14). Censorship hinders critical thinking and infringes on readers’ rights. Learn Magazine - University at Buffalo. https://ed.buffalo.edu/magazine/issues/fall-2023/censorship.html
Rodriguez, S. (2025, May 12). Texas bill would ban “obscene” material used with children for “educational” purposes. Live Action News. https://www.liveaction.org/news/texas-ban-obscene-material-educational-purposes/
Fisher, M. (n.d.). A legal renegade challenges the judicial system. Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/post-next/interactive/2025/jonathan-mitchell/
Price, A. (2023, February 16). Scoop: Texas abortion ban architect turns to libraries. Axios. https://www.axios.com/2023/02/16/texas-abortion-ban-libraries-books
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Black, Indigenous, and Persons of Color
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/questioning, Intersex, and Asexual, Plus
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
Jaeger, P. T., Jennings-Roche, A., Taylor, N. G., Gorham, U., Hodge, O., & Kettnich, K. (2023, May 30). The urge to censor: Raw Power, social control, and the criminalization of librarianship. The Political Librarian. https://journals.library.wustl.edu/pollib/article/id/8711/
SOOOO spot on and well sourced!