When the U.S. Supreme Court announced the Dobbs decision in June of 2022, officially upending decades of legal precedent set by Roe v. Wade, many in the anti-abortion movement celebrated a long-sought victory.
The new book, “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America” by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, explores the decade before the Dobbs decision and the political apparatus that made it possible.
The authors, both New York Times reporters, joined us on Texas Standard to talk about the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This interview has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What drew you both to write about this topic? And how long has this book been in the making? Either of you feel free to jump in?
Elizabeth Dias: I’ve been covering religion, Lisa has been covering politics, and especially the impact for women, for much of our careers.
We noticed that the right was increasingly becoming more radical and aggressive on this issue. And around the time of oral arguments in the Supreme Court case that eventually overturned Roe, we decided this was clearly happening. This is going to be the future, whether or not America was ready for it or realized it or not.
And we really felt it was our responsibility as journalists to take a serious historical look at how America got here.
What went into the investigative work that you two did?
Lisa Lerer: We relied very heavily on sourcing that we had built up over 20 or so years of reporting on religion and politics and abortion. We did a lot of interviews, more than 300 interviews, with people really at all levels – from activists in local groups all the way up to the highest levels of government.
And really, what we did was create the first history of the fall of Roe. We looked at the past decade, which we call the “final decade in the Roe era,” where the pace of efforts by the anti-abortion movement really accelerated to achieve long-held goal of taking down Roe. And we ended up putting together a timeline of all the events that had taken place during that period.
So it was really an expansive, extensive look at this ten-year period that I think helps explain how we got here. And our thinking is, if you understand how the country got to this point, you can better understand where the country might be going, particularly as we stand on the edge of this very pivotal election.
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Throughout this book you follow Cecile Richards, who has a prominent Texas connection. Her mother was Gov. Ann Richards, and I think back when she was 16 years old she helped her mother campaign for Sarah Weddington, the attorney who actually won Roe v. Wade when Weddington was running for a Texas state Legislature.
But you have this other figure, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who is on the other side of this debate. Say more about Dannenfelser, in particular, if you would.
Elizabeth Dias: If you’re thinking about the women, especially on the right, who were at the forefront of figuring out how to overturn Roe, Marjorie was one of the main leaders of that movement.
She is also a Southern woman from North Carolina. She became Catholic and she really devoted her entire professional life – from the time she came to Washington after college in the early ’90s to today – to overturning Roe. And not just overturning Roe, but figuring out how to end abortion altogether.
And her organization at the time was called Susan B. Anthony List — now it’s Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. And in the ’90s, you know, people were not paying much attention to her and her work or the conservative young women who were galvanized against the rising liberal feminism that women like Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were bringing to Washington at that time.
They took a very long view about how they were going to end abortion and really remake American womanhood and what it means to be a woman in America today. And they were quite successful.
Cecile Richards, of course, was president of Planned Parenthood. She started with Planned Parenthood in 2006, and she had been sounding an alarm over threats to Roe going way back.
But I think that there was a sort of received wisdom among many that perhaps there had been so much precedent built up around Roe in the years since the decision was handed down that the prospect of Roe being truly threatened was not quite the imminent danger that perhaps Richards thought. Do you think I’ve got that wrong?
Lisa Lerer: I think, in some ways, Roe was falling from the moment it was decided.
Basically from the year after it was decided, Republicans and anti-abortion leaders started chipping away at it – limiting access to abortion rights, making doctors get special credentials and all these things that made it harder to get an abortion. And then, what we document is in this past decade, they’ve really been striking at the precedent itself.
First, obviously, the shift in the court enabled that. And once they were able to attach themselves to Trump, Trump put in place the justices, and then they started running up a series of laws that would really take direct aim at Roe. So it was a very long process that stretched over this whole 50-year arc, but it was one that really accelerated in the final decade.
But I think part of it is because Roe had been part of American life for 50 years and really part of how people thought about their families and how women thought about their reproductive lives, it was hard for many Americans to imagine it could simply disappear. It was just something that was sort of there. And so when it did finally happen, although momentum had been building for so long and so methodically by the anti-abortion movement, it really came as quite a shock to a lot of people in the country.
Was there a moment in which it seemed, looking back, that Roe v. Wade was doomed? You think about, of course, the Supreme Court judicial nominations that’s always a focal point. Was that the tipping point of what we are talking about?
Elizabeth Dias: I think the reality is that it’s this cumulation of events — and obviously the election in 2016 of former President Donald Trump changed the picture radically.
The anti-abortion movement decided to back him and to take every opportunity to form his administration in their own image. And there were moments that no one could have predicted, including the death of Justice Scalia right before the 2016 election and how Republicans responded to that. And, of course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just before the 2020 election, solidifying what ended up being an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court.
As you said, this book is not just about what happened in the past. It’s about what it tells us for the future. And I wonder where this leaves both movements today. Do reproductive rights supporters have a similar strategy to undo Dobbs as opponents did with Roe?
Lisa Lerer: The politics have just so completely scrambled. I think that was one thing that many people on both sides were unprepared for.
Roe had not been a deeply motivating issue for the Democratic Party, in part because many of their supporters didn’t really believe it was at risk. And then Roe fell. And all of a sudden, abortion rights is probably the best thing Democrats have going in the midterms and in this election as well.
So that left the anti-abortion movement really struggling to find their way. They had benefited from this broad sense of denial that they no longer had. And so you see that in how Trump is moved all over the place on the issue, how a lot of the Republican candidates have sort of run away from their previously held positions opposing abortion rights.
But that being said, there is no long term strategy on the abortion rights side to get this back. They’re working on it now. There’s a coalition of groups that’s trying to figure out some kind of decade-long plan.
But the reality is that it’s really hard. There’s no magic wand that any Democratic president can wave to grant back federal abortion rights. It would have to go through Congress and through the Senate and where it would have a really high bar towards passage. And there’s not even agreement on what putting abortion rights into federal law would look like.
Even after Roe was passed, there was a long running debate among legal and political scholars and thinkers who said reproductive rights as we know it under Roe will never be truly secure without a constitutional amendment. You’ll always be fighting over this with every Supreme Court nomination, with every change in the political dynamic beyond reproductive rights. Given what we’ve seen in the polls, will that ever happen?
Lisa Lerer: There’s people who want that to happen. But that’s a really high bar to get a constitutional amendment in and passed, particularly in an environment where the country is deeply, deeply polarized.
So I think certainly in the abortion rights movement, that’s not seen as their best path towards codifying abortion rights. And what we’ve seen them do is what has been achievable for them in the fastest way possible, which is to codify abortion rights in various state constitutions. And it’s on the ballot in a whole bunch of places this election cycle as well.
And they will have success. Every single one of those referendums have passed so far. That may not be the case this year, we don’t know yet. But certainly we expect the majority of them to pass.
So that’s the approach they’re taking because that’s what I think feels achievable and politically viable to abortion rights advocates and Democrats who support them.
“The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America” will be featured at the Texas Book Festival in Austin during the weekend of Nov. 16-17.
