Nancy Northup wanted to leap through her Zoom screen. It was March 2022, three months after the Dobbs oral arguments. The White House had called this meeting, during Women’s History Month, to celebrate new legislation making it easier for sexual assault victims to sue their employers.
The administration had invited the country’s leading abortion-rights advocates—Northup, Alexis McGill Johnson, and Mini Timmaraju—along with women’s organizations and groups that worked on issues like domestic violence, to meet with Ron Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff, and other aides. McGill Johnson was in the Zoom box next to her. Timmaraju was inside the room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the White House.
Biden, unsurprisingly, was not there. He rarely talked about abortion. In fact, as president, he’d never uttered the word or met with the leaders of their organizations—a striking contrast with Dannenfelser, who met with the president frequently during the Trump administration. His joint address to Congress—his version of a State of the Union that first year in office—did not mention the threat to abortion rights, referring only in passing to “protecting women’s health.” Vice President Kamala Harris, fairly outspoken on the issue during her primary campaign, had made no notable remarks about the topic since taking office.
And even now, abortion rights didn’t top the agenda for this meeting.
It was infuriating, thought Northup. Texas had already criminalized nearly all abortion. Other states, like Arizona and Florida, were moving forward with new bans. A decision on Dobbs was imminent, and from the moment she left the steps of the court that cold day in December, Northup knew Roe was over. She didn’t know precisely how: Would John Roberts get support for a fifteen-week compromise? Or would Roe be completely overturned? But it didn’t matter. Federal abortion rights would soon be lost, perhaps at least for a generation.
After all this, it seemed impossible that the White House—and its Democratic allies—still did not understand the force of what was about to come. She remembered explaining the case and the likely outcome to a Democratic senator after oral arguments. The senator had responded, “Wow, I thought you were going to have better news for me.”
Northup couldn’t take the Democratic disbelief anymore. She did not know how to be clearer. There was no path to victory. Roe would fall. There were no more briefs to save it. No appeals left to file. She jumped in. “I am going to say something I have never said in twenty years running the center,” she said.
“We are going to lose this case,” she blurted out.
A heavy silence settled over the room. It felt different hearing it out loud, thought Timmaraju, even if she knew what was coming.
Klain and the other administration aides in the room offered promises. They were working on plans. The president had directed the Gender Policy Council, which he had established when he entered office, to start looking at ways to blunt the impact of a decision. The administration had created a task force to draft plans to advance access to reproductive health. They wanted to keep in close contact, the aides said. We’ll stay in touch, they promised.
Northup closed her Zoom window. Democrats controlled the executive branch, the House, and the Senate, and abortion-rights advocates couldn’t get their own meeting at the White House. Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the entire abortion-rights movement had rallied their supporters, raising money and lending their extensive field operations, to elect Biden and other Democrats. Where were those Democrats now, when their movement needed them? Still, in front of them all, Northup had done her duty from her computer screen. She delivered her message. Hopefully, she thought, Biden and his team would listen.
In the Manhattan offices of the Center for Reproductive Rights, her lawyers had begun preparing for this new era. Northup knew that ending Roe wouldn’t end abortion. It would just relocate it. Since the Texas abortion ban became law, studies indicated that around 1,400 women were leaving the state monthly for abortions. If Roe fell, abortion would move from clinics in Jackson and Sioux Falls to bedrooms, across state lines, and into emergency rooms when women’s health reached the stage of critical care.
Already, the center was working with Planned Parenthood and the ACLU to sketch out litigation plans. They were exploring ways to keep clinics open, challenge trigger bans, and exploit any possible ambiguity in the decision. Their maps were the reverse of the whiteboard hanging in Dannenfelser’s office, charting out safe-haven states, middle ground, and at-risk areas.
Where Dannenfelser’s map was imbued with her vision of political possibility, theirs showed a nation closing its doors to abortion rights and women’s health. Even with unified control of Washington, there was little Democrats could do to save Roe. Since 2019, over a dozen liberal states had escalated their efforts to protect abortion rights and expand access. One striking example was in Michigan, where Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer had filed a preemptive lawsuit to overturn the state’s trigger law, a process she began after Ginsburg died. But, at best, that was less than half the country.
The Biden administration had called on Congress to codify Roe into federal law, but it hadn’t proposed specific legislation or unveiled any strategy to advance such a bill. Truthfully, the effort was futile. Given the continued support for the filibuster, the only way abortion-rights supporters could move forward with a bill enshrining Roe in federal law was with sixty votes in the Senate. They had fifty-two votes for abortion rights, counting Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Winning eight more seats in such a divided country would be nearly impossible.
Democrats and their allies on the left weren’t blasé about abortion rights. But like much of America, it was hard for them to see clearly—and even harder to believe—what was coming. The antiabortion forces had done their job well. They didn’t conceal their ultimate aim; they had talked about undoing Roe for decades. The Federalist Society had made clear its intention to reorient the court around a new set of conservative principles that would make the justices more willing to undo precedents of the past.
But the storm of laws and litigation, proposals and policies over the past decade had made it easy to dismiss the antiabortion movement’s efforts as just another round of incremental steps. The laws seemed like small actions by fringe Republican state legislators, who were powerless to change national policy. All that noise drowned out the bigger picture of how a decade of work was leading to a new kind of court.
The antiabortion movement took advantage of the country’s complicated views about abortion to strike at what Americans didn’t find complicated at all: Roe. In the weeks after oral arguments, a CNN poll found that nearly 70 percent of Americans wanted Roe to be upheld, a number that had stayed broadly consistent since Alito was put on the bench in 2006. In April, nearly the same majority—62 percent—said they were unaware of any laws passed by their state making it harder to get an abortion. The conclusions were clear. Most Americans supported abortion rights. And most Americans didn’t realize they were at risk.
That disconnect had created a believability gap that had endured through the past decade. The antiabortion forces crept forward, but the broad sense of Roe’s inviolability never changed. Not after Donald Trump won. Not after Brett Kavanaugh and then Amy Coney Barrett joined the court. Not after oral arguments. And not now, even as they waited for the decision. It was like that old maxim about a frog in a pot of cold water, the temperature rising slowly, as the frog sat unaware, slowly boiling alive.
It all left Cecile Richards contemplating where the America that her mother had promised had gone. She remembered when the religious right defeated Ann and all those other Democratic lawmakers in 1994. She had underestimated them. “The folks that took over the Republican Party in Texas that year are really running the show all over the country,” she said. The power of a majority wasn’t enough to overcome the “raw, bare-knuckled politics, of a minority exercising its power over a majority,” she wrote in The New York Times.
“I had faith that if we provided excellent health care and showed how access to reproductive rights had helped women, as well as our economy, and if we kept most of the country on our side, this, too, would pass,” she wrote. “I was wrong.”