On December 10th about a dozen people file into a church in Seminole, Texas. Upbeat Christmas music plays softly over the speakers as people take their seats in wooden pews. But the pastor is not the main speaker. He hands the microphone to Mark Lee Dickson, an anti-abortion activist, and David Gallegos, a state senator for New Mexico. The two men explain how their plan to ban abortion in eastern New Mexico could deter women from neighbouring Texas from crossing state lines for the procedure. They are coming, says Mr Gallegos. The only way to stop death in my state is help from your state.

New Mexicos role in Americas abortion wars derives largely from its geography. Abortion in the state is legal throughout all stages of pregnancy. But New Mexico shares a border with Texas and Oklahoma, where the procedure is illegal, and touches Arizona and Utah, which have restrictions. The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion research group, finds that abortions in New Mexico more than tripled between 2020 and 2023, the largest percentage increase of any state. Adrienne Mansanares, chief executive of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, reckons that more than 80% of patients at the groups clinic in Las Cruces, New Mexico, come from Texas.

New Mexico has thus become a target for anti-abortion activists. Mr Dickson initially sought merely to limit abortion in cities and counties in Texas. But in 2021 the state passed SB8, which in effect banned the procedure, and a year later the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade. The emboldened activist now has his sights set on eastern New Mexico, which is home to plenty of conservative, rural communities that chafe against the states progressive government and permissive abortion laws. Its basically West West Texas, says Laura Wight, a member of Eastern New Mexico Rising, a rare progressive group in the region.

Several municipalities in New Mexico recently passed ordinances that endeavour to ban abortion despite state law. The states attorney-general sued them, and the case came before New Mexicos Supreme Court on December 13th. The ordinances have two goals. The first is to deter Texas women from seeking an abortion in New Mexico. Whole Womans Health, which runs abortion clinics, recently considered opening an office in Hobbs, just across the state line from Seminole, but decided on progressive Albuquerque instead. Hobbs is right in line for getting abortion clinics and weve been fighting that tooth and toenail, says Jan Auld, a Hobbs resident who attended the church meeting in Seminole.

Second, Mr Dickson and his supporters want the New Mexico ordinances to bolster their argument that a federal law on the books since 1873, known as the Comstock Act, already in effect blocks abortion nationwide. The Comstock Act is an ambiguous anti-vice law that prohibits the mailing of obscene or lewd materials, including things related to contraception and abortion. Some argue that it could be used to block the shipping of any tools used for abortion, making the procedure difficult to perform at all.

The law was only ever patchily enforced, explains Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at the University of California, Davis. It was this sort of weird relationship between government and social-movement activists, she adds. There were very few prosecutions even before Roe established a constitutional right to abortion in 1973. But the eastern New Mexico ordinances assert that Comstock is the supreme law of the land, thereby trumping any New Mexico law that protects abortion.

New Mexicos Supreme Court will probably disagree. During oral arguments the justices appeared loth to consider Comstock at all. They seem minded to rule that the new local laws violate state law: case closed. But the debate over Comstock will rage on. A federal judge in Texas recently ruled that the 150-year-old law plainly forecloses mail-order abortion, referring to the Food and Drug Administrations approval of mifepristone, a drug used to end a pregnancy. The Supreme Court will hear the case in 2024.

The question of whether, and how, Comstock is enforced will also loom over the 2024 presidential election. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank that has published detailed policy plans for a second Donald Trump term, contends that the next conservative administration should announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.

David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, argues that, should he lose the election, in the lame-duck period before he leaves office President Joe Biden should consider pardoning anyone who may have violated the Comstock Act. The Biden administration is not going to enforce that law, Mr Dickson tells those gathered at the church. But another administration might.

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Conservative towns in liberal American states want to ban abortion - The Economist