About ComstockCon
The Conference
ComstockCon was a convening inspired by the fallout from the Dobbs decision and broader attacks on bodily autonomy.
Originally conceived by co-organizers Kendra Albert and Melissa Gira Grant in 2022 as a way to forecast what enforcement of the Comstock Act might look like without Roe, in the ensuing months, a coalition of anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQ rights, and Christian right groups have been openly calling for the next conservative president to enforce the Comstock Act as a nationwide abortion ban. We brought folks together to imagine a post-Comstock future.
Our Team
Kendra Albert
Kendra Albert is a clinical instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, and a lecturer in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. They direct the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment. Their work has appeared in Wired, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. Kendra serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors for the Tor Project, and as a member of the Board of Directors of the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant is a staff writer at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work (Verso). She is at work on her next book, A Woman Is Against the Law: Sex, Race, and the Limits of Justice in America (forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company). Previously, she was a senior staff writer at The Appeal covering the criminal legal system, as well as a contributing writer at the Village Voice and Pacific Standard.
Jasjot Kaur
Jasjot Kaur is the senior program coordinator for the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment.
Advisory Committee
Our team was advised by a committee of leading voices in movements for bodily autonomy, including reproductive justice, sex workers’ rights, disability justice, trans justice, and justice for criminalized survivors.
Danielle Blunt
Danielle Blunt is a sex worker, community organizer, public health researcher, and the co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, a collective of sex workers and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice to interrupt state surveillance and violence facilitated by technology. Blunt leads community-based participatory research on sex work and equitable access to technology from a public health perspective. They are a 2023-2025 Social Science Research Council Just Tech Fellow, a Senior Civic Media Fellow at USC’s Annenberg Innovation Lab, and on the advisory board of Berkman Klein's Initiative for a Representative First Amendment (IfRFA). Blunt organizes cross-movement, sex-worker-led trainings for the abortion access movement with Digital Defense Fund. They are also a recipient of both Electronic Frontier Foundation’s annual award and Public Knowledge’s 20/20 Visionary Award for Future Tech Policy Leaders. She enjoys watching her community thrive and making men cry.
Renee Bracey Sherman
Renee Bracey Sherman is a reproductive justice activist, abortion storyteller, and writer. She is the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions and share their stories at the intersection of race, class, and gender identity. She is also an executive producer of Ours to Tell, an award-winning documentary elevating the voices of people who’ve had abortions, co-host of The A Files: A Secret History of Abortion, a podcast from The Meteor, and the co-author of the forthcoming book LIBERATING ABORTION: Our Legacy, Stories, and Vision for How We Save Us from Amistad/HarperCollins.
Gillian Frank
Gillian Frank is a historian of sexuality and religion and a lecturer at Stevens Institute of Technology. He is also a visiting affiliate fellow at Princeton University's Center for Culture, Society and Religion. Frank is the author of numerous academic articles on the histories of sexuality, gender and religion (which have appeared in venues like the Journal of the History of Sexuality, American Jewish History, and Gender and History) and public facing scholarship (with bylines in publications including The Washington Post, Time, Jezebel and Slate). He is co-editor of Devotions and Desires: Histories of Sexuality and Religion in the 20th Century United States (UNC Press: 2018). Frank is currently at work on a manuscript called A Sacred Choice: Liberal Religion and the Struggle for Abortion Before Roe v Wade (forthcoming UNC Press). You can listen to his podcast Sexing History, which explores how the history of sexuality shapes our present, wherever you stream your shows.
Jules Gill-Peterson
Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She is the author of Histories of the Transgender Child (2018) and A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024).
Andrea Grimes
Andrea Grimes is a Texan writer, communications strategist, and activist who has been covering and supporting the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements for over 15 years. Her reporting, news analyses, and op-eds have have appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, MSNBC, the Columbia Journalism Review, DAME, Rewire News, the Texas Observer and dozens of other publications, and she holds a master's degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas. Her newsletter, Home With The Armadillo, features a weekly abortion news roundup and dispatches on feminism, media criticism, and politics from the heart of the Lone Star state. She lives in Austin with her husband, two cats, and a hyperactive hound dog.
Supporters
ComstockCon was hosted by the Initiative for a Representative First Amendment at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University, with the funding and support of the Ford Foundation.