Cecile Richards couldn’t believe the moment had finally arrived. When Planned Parenthood was founded, almost a century ago, women didn’t have the right to vote. Now, the group was about to make its first presidential primary endorsement. For a woman.
And not any woman. A feminist icon, a history-maker. First female partner at the oldest law firm in Arkansas. First wife of a major presidential candidate to have her own career, not to just “stay home and bake cookies.” First Lady with an office in the West Wing. First female senator from New York. First major female candidate for president. And Obama’s secretary of state.
In the early months of her campaign, Hillary Clinton wondered whether her life story was compelling enough to power a presidential candidacy. The forty-three men who held the job had fashioned their personal histories into narratives that reflected heroic national myths. Her husband’s journey from the small town of Hope, Arkansas, to the White House was a triumph of the American meritocratic dream. Obama’s multicultural journey, placed squarely in the civil rights tradition, spoke to progress toward a post-racial America.
The daughter of a middle-class couple from suburban Chicago, Hillary Rodham was the first in her family to attend college. A lifelong Methodist, she met Bill Clinton in law school, and her future became intertwined in his. Little seemed remarkable about that story, a common one for women of her generation, she believed. What grand narrative did her personal history tell about America, she wondered, as she prepared to launch her campaign.
But over time, Clinton came to realize that her life was a revolutionary story. One that started at home, exploded into the workplace, and then, finally, entered the halls of American power. Her mother was born on the day Congress took final action to give women the right to vote. Now Clinton, part of the very next generation, would vie to lead the nation. But that narrative—one of women’s advancement in American life—lacked a political tradition with the same public resonance as Obama’s civil rights struggle or her husband’s meritocratic climb. Even in 2016, a female presidential nominee remained a novelty, an idea with a long history but little real-life precedent.
In the years that followed, analysts would describe the historic campaign between Clinton and Donald Trump as a referendum on immigration, racial fears, income inequality, distrust in government, and countless other issues. They would blame Clinton’s lackluster political skills, muddled message, or the failures of her campaign operation for her eventual defeat. But what was also inescapable was the intertwining of this particular electoral matchup—a contest between an experienced female politician and a male celebrity—with the country’s complicated feelings about women and their place in a changing nation.
Clinton, with her unique position on the front lines of American gender politics for decades, became an avatar for the past fifty years of gender progress. Unlike during her first run for president in 2008, when she largely ceded the mantle of making history to Barack Obama, Clinton now leaned into her gender. Her crowds were mostly female, as were most of her donors. Out of the eighty-four slogans considered by her team, “I’m with her” became the one chanted at her rallies. Trump’s “Make America Great Again,” meanwhile, carried an implicit promise to undo the sexual revolution and return the country to an idealized version of 1950s America. A time before sexual mores shifted, before second-wave feminism, before women flooded into professional life. A time before Roe.
Clinton was old enough to remember that earlier America. She was twenty-five years old when the Roe decision was issued, finishing Yale Law and working to defend the legal rights of children. From the time she arrived in Washington as First Lady, on the heels of the 1992 Year of the Woman, she fought openly for abortion rights. She used her platform to declare “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” Later, when she became a senator, she voted against the partial-birth abortion ban, unlike more than a dozen of her Democratic peers. Then, as Obama’s secretary of state, she made a mission of expanding reproductive health across the globe.
Early in her tenure, she offered a defense of abortion that became legendary.
“Does the United States’ definition of the term reproductive health or reproductive services or reproductive rights include abortion?” Representative Chris Smith, the chair of the Pro-Life Caucus in Congress, asked her during a 2009 House hearing, clearly thinking he’d found the question to make her squirm.
“You are entitled to advocate, and everyone who agrees with you should be free to do so everywhere in the world. And so are we,” said Clinton, sitting still in a white suit jacket and pearl necklace, before launching into a three-minute defense of abortion rights.
“So we disagree,” she finally concluded, “and we are now an administration that will protect the rights of women, including their rights to reproductive health care.” Then, as Smith glared, she lowered her eyes, ever so slightly pursed her lips, and leaned back against her chair, in effect dropping the mic. Abortion-rights advocates circulated the clip for years.
Now, Planned Parenthood hoped that Clinton would bring that revolution to transform abortion rights all the way into the White House. But first, there was one small issue her campaign had to handle.
For years, when it came to abortion, Hillary Clinton championed her belief in the words of her time: “Safe, legal, and rare.” It was a phrase popularized by her husband during his 1992 presidential campaign as a way to position himself as a moderate and win support from Reagan Democrats—particularly working-class Catholic voters—who opposed the procedure. But nearly a quarter century later, younger abortion-rights advocates saw those kinds of words, and others used by supportive Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s, like choice and women’s health, as euphemisms that stigmatized the procedure and made it more difficult to defend politically. Not saying the word abortion reinforced the view that it was different from any other kind of medical procedure—more shameful or wrong—and implicitly fed into their “opponents’” arguments that it should be banned, these activists argued.
Clinton realized the dynamics had shifted even since her previous run for the White House in 2008. She saw the restrictive laws passing in the states, and she had monitored the escalating attacks against Planned Parenthood. But while no one doubted her support, some on her staff worried that her words hadn’t quite caught up to the moment. Before she formally accepted Planned Parenthood’s endorsement in early 2016, campaign aides scheduled an internal call to brief Clinton on the new rules when talking about abortion.
The call was limited to a small set of aides, but the message was crucially important. When you mean abortion, say abortion, her staff urged. Not “women’s health.” And most of all, don’t say “safe, legal, and rare” anymore, they argued. “Safe and legal” was still okay. But not “rare.”
“What?” Clinton replied. She demanded the rationale for the change.
Aides explained that many activists thought calling for abortion to be “rare” would offer a political concession to their opponents. Plus, with so many new restrictions in the states, abortion was increasingly difficult to obtain, particularly for poorer women, making “rare” the wrong focus for their message. Abortion should be “safe, legal, accessible, and affordable,” they told her.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” Clinton huffed. “That’s stupid.”
It was a small but meaningful conversation that illustrated a notable generational shift on the issue. Clinton’s befuddlement reflected how her generation, the one that fought for Roe, understood abortion politics. But now women were beginning to speak about their miscarriages and abortions with more candor. This new generation of activists wanted to pull abortion out of the shadows. They could start by changing the language of their allies. Clinton erased the phrase from her vocabulary. And she never looked back.
What she and other Democrats had tried to do in 1992 with “safe, legal and rare” was “send a signal that we understand Roe v. Wade has a certain theory of the case about trimesters,” she explained. But by 2016, the world had changed. “Young women did not understand the effort that went into creating the underlying theory of Roe v. Wade. And the young women on my campaign made a very compelling argument that making it safe and legal was really the goal,” she said. “I kind of just pocketed the framework of Roe. Roe is there.”
Led by one of their most stalwart champions, the abortion rights movement entered a new era. When Clinton took the stage in Hooksett, New Hampshire, in January 2016 to publicly accept the Planned Parenthood endorsement, her navy pantsuit drawing a sharp contrast against the hot-pink backdrop, she cut straight to the point. “I have stood with you throughout my life and certainly throughout my career, and I promise you this: as your president, I will always have your back,” she said. “We will work and fight together.”
She also issued a warning: “I shudder to think about what the Republicans would do if given the chance,” she said, raising the possibility that the next president could make multiple appointments to the Supreme Court. “They are telling you exactly what they will do if they get elected. And you know what, we should believe them.”
Still, the future seemed brighter than ever for supporters of abortion rights. Richards hadn’t been this excited about a candidate since her mother announced she was running for governor more than a quarter century earlier. In her New York City apartment, she kept a go bag packed with a hand steamer and sensible shoes—so she could quickly travel the country building support for Clinton.
For her part, Clinton made good on her promise. She didn’t just oppose the Hyde Amendment, advocating for the repeal of the decades-old policy to be included in the party platform for the first time in history; she actively campaigned on the issue. A right is “no right at all,” she said, if you have to take “extraordinary measures to access it.” She promised to appoint judges who would preserve Roe. A lawyer herself, her judicial thinking took into account societal changes, the opposite philosophy of the originalism of Leo. She dismissed any idea that fetuses had constitutional rights. And she opposed efforts in Congress to pass a twenty-week abortion ban.
The sense of possibility grew in late June, when the Supreme Court finally ruled on the abortion restrictions Davis had filibustered in Texas. Sitting in her office in Manhattan, Richards got a single-word text message from her daughter: “Yay!” On the steps of the Supreme Court, abortion-rights activists hollered, hugged, and cried joyful tears. It was the court’s biggest defense of abortion rights since Casey in 1992.
Their confidence that the Supreme Court would eventually save them was, in this instance, proven correct. The vote in the case, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, vindicated their belief that the Texas law was illegitimate. The majority ruled that the restrictions on doctors and clinics violated the prohibition set in Casey of placing an “undue burden” on the ability to obtain an abortion. The vote was 5–3, the justices short one of their nine due to Antonin Scalia’s death.
To Richards, the ruling showed the power of their protest in Texas. To her, it was a lesson in the role that organizing—not just litigation—could play in the abortion rights fight. They had failed, but not really, she thought, because they won at the Supreme Court. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited the very stories and research Davis had read aloud during her filibuster. “Organizing matters,” Richards said. “You just never know and you just never can give up. And things happen that people say are impossible.” But the reality was that their trust in the court carried a cost. The case took years and cost millions, and twenty-two abortion clinics in Texas had closed.
There was another cost, too, one that was harder to see at the time. A section of the law still stood. It was the very portion that most directly undercut Roe, the part that prohibited abortion after twenty weeks, several weeks earlier than Roe’s viability standard. Abortion groups had not asked the Supreme Court to review that provision in the law. It had been a strategic choice: Why risk alienating Justice Anthony Kennedy and causing the court to uphold a twenty-week standard, they reasoned, if there was the possibility of an even stronger 6–3 majority after Clinton won and got to fill Scalia’s old seat? After all this litigation, they could end up with a future Supreme Court that was even more favorable to abortion rights.
Within days, Planned Parenthood announced legal campaigns to repeal similar laws mandating restrictions on doctors and clinics in eight states. It was a first salvo in a longer plan to challenge the 286 other abortion restrictions passed by conservative state legislatures across the country since 2010.
Stephanie Toti, the Center for Reproductive Rights’ lawyer who argued the case, made plans to form a new organization that would leverage the new precedent created by the case. Her new group planned to challenge abortion restrictions across the country, taking advantage of the “golden age of reproductive rights” that would begin once Clinton reached the White House. It was, she thought at the time, “a moment of great potential and great promise.”
No one doubted that Trump was a threat. Days after the ruling, Justice Ginsburg took the extraordinary step of speaking out against the Republican candidate. She called him “a faker” to CNN, and wondered about the need to move to New Zealand if he won. “I can’t imagine what the country would be with Donald Trump as our president,” she told The New York Times. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”
As she campaigned across battleground states, Clinton continued to offer warnings about the court, pointing to the originalist jurisprudence a Trump-appointed justice would likely embrace. “In a single term, the Supreme Court could demolish pillars of the progressive movement,” she said in a speech at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “What kind of justice will a President Trump appoint?”
But few of her supporters believed he could actually win. To many on the left, Trump, a neophyte who stayed busy breaking every rule of politics, seemed practically unelectable. A more feminist future seemed ascendant. In Los Angeles, a feminist graphic design studio began printing THE FUTURE IS FEMALE on shirts, reclaiming a 1972 radical lesbian slogan and donating 25 percent of the proceeds to Planned Parenthood. The shirt started appearing on women and their daughters in liberal enclaves from Silver Lake to Hyde Park, Park Slope to Burlington.
For the first time in history, the Democratic National Committee platform included a call to repeal the Hyde Amendment and the Helms Amendment, which prohibited foreign aid from being spent on abortion. When Richards took the stage at the Democratic convention that year, once again in a navy suit and her mother’s gold sheriff-badge pin, she couldn’t help but remember her mother addressing the 1988 convention. Standing under the bright lights, in a prime-time speech broadcast across the country, Richards said abortion, the word once considered politically unsayable, three times in five minutes. As the red warning light telling her she was over her time blinked, Richards said with a smile: “Tonight, we are closer than ever to putting a woman in the White House, and I can almost hear Mom saying, ‘Well, it sure took y’all long enough!’”
When Clinton finally accepted the nomination on that final evening, in her white suffragist pantsuit, even some of the strongest Trump supporters couldn’t deny the power of the moment. “I won’t be voting for her, but there’s no doubt that today is a historic day as one of America’s major parties nominates a woman for president,” said Lynn Fitch, the Mississippi state treasurer, who stood behind Trump, in a gleaming white blazer, clapping and cheering at his rally in Jackson that evening. But, she added, “having the same sex doesn’t mean her policies are best for women.”
The cultural moment, the political winds, and the electoral momentum all seemed to be propelling abortion rights forward. Polls predicted a historically large gender gap, even bigger than in Obama’s race against Mitt Romney four years earlier.
Liberal women everywhere thought they glimpsed the future. A President Clinton would prioritize women in their policies across the globe. Supreme Court Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg would retire, and Clinton would get to appoint at least three liberal replacements, stacking the court in their favor for a generation. Champions of their movement—women like Richards—would be placed in influential posts across her administration. They would expand the availability of contraception and repeal Hyde. Planned Parenthood would be protected. And the promise of Roe would become a reality.
After she won the election, Clinton would expand Obama’s liberal vision into a new era, one where abortion rights were not just protected but expanded. The arc of history that Obama was so fond of mentioning would bend even further toward equality and diversity, her supporters expected, with at least a dozen straight years of Democratic governance. America would be remade by the first woman president. It was only a matter of waiting until Inauguration Day.