Ilyse Hogue watched the siege on the Capitol in horror, unable to tear her eyes away from the footage of attackers storming into buildings and destroying the hallowed grounds of American democracy. She had spent years trying to warn about the marriage of right-wing extremism with the antiabortion cause. Now, she was watching their violent merger in real time, as new radicals tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Her phone started exploding with messages. Abortion providers and clinic operators traded texts about faces they recognized in the grainy close-up photographs and jerky video footage from that horrible day. They saw Tayler Hansen, the antiabortion activist who painted “Baby Lives Matter” outside clinics from Salt Lake City to Richmond, filming a woman named Ashli Babbitt as she lay dying on the floor of the Capitol.
There was John Brockhoeft, who firebombed a Planned Parenthood clinic in Cincinnati, posting a video of himself describing Trump as “our beloved president” as he stood outside the Capitol. And there was Derrick Evans, a fixture at a West Virginia clinic with a reputation for such intense harassment of patients that a volunteer escort obtained a restraining order against him. Now a member of the West Virginia House of Delegates, Evans live streamed a video of himself, helmet-clad, joining the mob pushing its way into the Capitol. He was arrested two days later, pleaded guilty to civil disorder, and was sentenced to three months in jail and a fine.
At NARAL, Hogue had her staff collect the accounts in a research report, eventually turning their work into a digital ad. A few, mostly liberal, publications picked up on the ties between antiabortion activists and the violence. The ties evoked the long history of violent action from parts of the antiabortion movement, from the clinic bombings of the 1980s and 1990s to the killing of Doctor George Tiller, an abortion provider in Wichita, Kansas, shortly after Obama took office. “This was a movement that embraced political violence long before Trump,” she said. “It’s not like some of them had to be acculturated to it.”
Before members of the far-right Proud Boys marched toward the Capitol, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus. A group called the Jericho March, which had led a series of demonstrations for “election integrity,” marched around the Capitol seven times, modeling their protest on a biblical battle in which the Israelites marched around the city of Jericho until its walls crumbled, letting their armies take the city. Jericho marches were used by the antiabortion movement dating back to the 1970s, where protesters marched around abortion providers’ homes and offices.
The morning of January 6, at the Save America rally on the Mall, Abby Johnson, the post–Roe generation antiabortion activist, addressed the crowd—“all of you fine Patriots,” she called them—to defend Trump and unborn babies, just as she had at the Republican National Convention. “Christians in this country are too quiet. They are not crying out and demanding justice for our modern-day Holocaust that is taking place,” she declared to cheers. When Trump arrived at the rally, she took a selfie in the front row, the president behind her riling up the crowd before he urged everyone to march to the Capitol.
As the attack escalated that day and Trump refused to stop it, Marjorie Dannenfelser texted Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff. “Violence in pursuit of upholding justice and the dignity of the human being is nonsense at best. What is happening in the Capitol now is not reflective of prolife Americans and Trump supporters who align with his call to support police today,” she wrote, sharing a link to the statement she had released publicly.
Leaders of other major antiabortion groups also disavowed the attack. But the crowd standing inside and outside the Capitol that day included plenty of their own, showing how the more radical elements of their movement could eclipse them with their own tactics. Over four years, much of the antiabortion Christian coalition that pushed Trump and Mike Pence into office had become entangled with the conspiratorial beliefs that the president helped foster on issues like election denialism and opposition to public health mandates. Their spiritual and political mission to end abortion had become intertwined with the causes that animated Trumpism, now the defining ideology of the Republican Party. As the new party radicalized, so did their movement. Positions once relegated to the fringes of American political life—overturning an election or overturning Roe—suddenly seemed possible.
Republican senators who objected to the election results had long been among the most outspoken abortion opponents, including Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, and Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, a longtime SBA ally who was from Becky Currie’s hometown. But their ecosystem reached far deeper into American life. One city council member from Hillsdale, Michigan, who traveled to Washington to protest election fraud on January 6, returned home and helped propose an ordinance to outlaw abortion in his city.
“It is no different from the Right to Life march in January,” the councilman, Greg Stuchell, said of his fellow January 6 marchers. “For every one that was there, there’s probably another one hundred that wished they could be.”
But unlike the March for Life, a peaceful annual protest where families carried red roses, the Capitol siege was violent and extreme. Pence, long a champion of the antiabortion movement, was threatened by the crowd, as some called for his execution after he promised to uphold the election results. The attack pushed the bounds of political life in a way that was easy to recognize as radical, with potential to transform the country. A group of mostly men storming a government building with guns and assaulting about 140 police officers. It was a scene familiar from foreign countries or television shows. Macho extremism, ripped from an action film.
What was harder to see was how the slow, steady drumbeat—of litigation, appeals and stays, laws and confusing medical jargon, discussion of precedent and super-precedent and congressional rules—could actually add up to even more lasting change. The legal, political, and scientific maneuvering of the antiabortion movement, often with a feminine face, used democratic tools to transform American life from the inside. The tempo of that drumbeat was speeding up and couldn’t be easily stopped by simply electing a new president. It was a quieter change, one not expressed with smashed windows and shouts, but one that could also restructure a nation by controlling its most basic unit: parent and child. It was a transformational coup, and an entirely legal one.
TWO DAYS AFTER the January 6 attack, the Capitol grounds now ensconced in barricades, the Supreme Court justices had a private meeting. Three of them—Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—wanted to take up the Mississippi case that term, as soon as possible. That would likely mean delivering a decision in June 2021, less than a year after Ginsburg’s death.
But Brett Kavanaugh suggested an unusual and misleading alternative: vote to hear the case, but withhold the public announcement they had done so. The court could keep the case on its public docket week after week, he explained, giving the impression that no decision had been made. In the spring, the court would formally announce that it would hear the case, pushing oral arguments into the next term. The later schedule would allow more time for other abortion cases to move through the lower courts and would provide cover against allegations that the court’s new conservative majority was taking advantage of Ginsburg’s death. It would also give them some distance from the Capitol siege.
Amy Coney Barrett, just weeks into her new job, sided with Kavanaugh. If the case were going to be heard that term, she would vote against hearing it at all. Lacking the votes to move forward, Alito agreed to Kavanaugh’s conditions. Their plan was set. They would hear the case—but not tell anyone just yet.
Less than two weeks later, the Trump administration ended. Dannenfelser announced an “election transparency” campaign with her friend Frank Cannon’s American Principles Project to pass new restrictions on voting, after states loosened some voting rules during the pandemic. Prioritizing issues around Trump’s falsehood that the election was stolen was a way to keep donors, voters, and Trump’s biggest supporters engaged in their antiabortion mission.
ADF’s CEO, Michael Farris, who had initially opposed Trump in 2016, now secretly worked to block the election results. He sent draft language for a potential lawsuit to Republican attorneys general, fishing to get one of them to file suit against states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin to try to keep Trump in office. Texas ultimately did. It was similar to ADF’s model legislation effort to overturn Roe—handing allies a ready model to enact ADF’s ideological goals—though Farris said he acted in his personal capacity.
Leonard Leo quietly took control of one of the largest pools of political money in American history, with help from a secret $1.6 billion donation from a little-known conservative donor, Barre Seid. The intensely private Chicago-based electronics manufacturing mogul had spent decades quietly funding conservative causes. Now, at ninety, he had entrusted his legacy to Leo through a series of opaque transactions over a two-year period that allowed him to avoid as much as $400 million in taxes. There were few legal limitations—and little sunlight—on how Leo could use the money to influence American politics. The donation transformed Leo into a power broker who could steer the conservative movement and, perhaps, the future of the country. He started looking beyond the courts into pressing his conservative agenda on issues like education, election fraud, and diversity initiatives in corporations.
Abortion-rights activists began to feel some relief. Now Democrats held the trifecta of power in Washington—controlling the House, Senate, and White House—for the first time since 2010. Alexis McGill Johnson told the Associated Press she was “able to breathe in hope and possibility.” Biden moved quickly to reverse Trump policies in the early months of his administration. He rescinded the Mexico City policy, the rule blocking foreign nongovernmental organizations from providing information about abortion. On International Women’s Day, he signed an executive order establishing the Gender Policy Council, putting a longtime ally of the abortion-rights movement at the helm of a new office that aimed to protect sexual and reproductive health at home and abroad. That spring, he took steps to roll back the restrictions on Title X funding that had prompted Planned Parenthood to drop out of the program and lose tens of millions in federal money. And after some lobbying, his first budget proposal dropped the Hyde Amendment, which banned the use of federal dollars for abortions, fulfilling his campaign promise.
It wasn’t quite the Clinton dream that thrilled abortion-rights activists back in 2016. Biden still didn’t talk about abortion much. The new conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court and the Republican state legislatures remained a serious threat. Yet for the first time in many years, abortion-rights advocates felt some relief.
But their four years in the wilderness had already cost them so much. Even with their new power, they were limited in what they could do to stop the march on Roe. In the Senate, the Democratic majority lacked the votes to eliminate the filibuster and codify abortion rights into federal law.
State legislatures in more liberal states across the Northeast and West had begun enacting policies to protect abortion rights, but those could not compare to the national protection of Roe or compete with the large swaths of the Midwest and South where legal abortion could become largely unavailable. Democrats had never fully recovered from their brutal losses across the country during the Obama years. After the 2020 elections, Republicans still held unified control of state governments in more states, dominating twenty-three states compared to fifteen states controlled by Democrats.
Outside Washington, many people felt free to tune out what had felt like a never-ending noise of political news. Exhausted and overwhelmed after years of pandemic schooling, health precautions, and economic uncertainty, they took a break from politics. Biden had pledged to protect abortion rights. Now, he was elected and many voters assumed those rights were secure, particularly Roe, which most never really believed was at risk in the first place.
Besides, the court didn’t seem to be moving quickly when it came to Roe—at least in terms the public could see. The justices kept rescheduling consideration of Lynn Fitch’s petition to hear the Mississippi fifteen-week case. Week after week, Nancy Northup, the head of the Center for Reproductive Rights, which was suing Mississippi over the ban, checked the list of cases to see if the court would take up theirs. There was never an answer. The court just kept the case on their agenda for the next conference session when they considered what cases to accept for review. The extended delay was noteworthy, Northup thought. Both lower courts had unanimously rejected the law. It was blatantly unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedent of Roe and Casey. “They should have swatted away with no thought whatsoever,” she said.
She wondered about her opponents’ plan. They rarely took big swings. Typically, they inched forward, chipping away at abortion rights, and there were ways they could do that now too. They could prioritize one of the bans on abortion in cases of Down syndrome or race or sex selection, laws that might seem more reasonable to many Americans than a total ban at fifteen weeks. Why would they change course, she asked herself, when they were so close to the ultimate victory? “They’ve been very successful about being under the radar,” she said.
Even now, the biggest actions on abortion rights were happening under the radar. The powerful antiabortion network of the Trump years left executive power, but it had not been dismantled. It simply found new roles in new seats of influence.
As Biden took over, one promising conservative lawyer packed up his office in Washington, rented a car, and started driving south along the Blue Ridge Mountains. He was the exact kind of lawyer Leo had devoted his life to raising up. He was an originalist. A Stanford Law School graduate. A former Thomas clerk.
He was Scott Stewart, the Trump administration lawyer who had tried to stop Jane Doe from getting her abortion. Fitch had offered him a job, crafting strategy for her biggest cases. He headed toward Jackson.