Roe v. Wade fell on June 24, 2022. It had lasted forty-nine years.
The seminal ruling, which remade American politics and society, was gone. The 1973 decision that most American women believed had granted them a sense of autonomy and equality—and that had pushed Christian conservatives to war—was over. After decades of legislation and lawsuits, failures and victories, politicking and prayer, the country finally split in two. A fault line became a chasm. With the words on the Dobbs opinion’s first page, a new America was born:
Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.
The Dobbs ruling was the final cause of death for a right that had been growing weaker for decades. For half a century, America’s highest legal authority understood that a right to an abortion was rooted in the Constitution’s promise of liberty and implied right to privacy. This new court declared that reasoning was wrong and reversed Roe entirely. The vote tally was 6–3, and Samuel Alito wrote the opinion. The final copy was nearly unchanged from the leaked draft, save for the addition of the opposing arguments.
“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” Casey, the decision that affirmed that women had a right to end their pregnancies until a fetus could survive separately from a woman’s uterus, fell completely too.
For decades, Roe had been a symbol of American ideals. Its fall was a symbol, too, of a new set of values that had taken power in America. Roe, understood for years by liberal America as an embodiment of freedom and equality for women, was replaced by Dobbs, a decision that conservative Christians saw as a manifestation of the primacy of life and that conservative lawyers believed corrected the legal overreach of the 1960s and 1970s.
All six justices who undercut Roe were Leonard Leo mainstays: he had been involved in confirming Clarence Thomas, John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. All were in the Federalist Society mold. And all were conservative Catholics, though Gorsuch attended an Episcopal church later in life. It was a vast shift from 1973, when all the justices were Protestant save one—and the sole Catholic justice sided with the majority in favor of Roe.
With one ruling, this new court created a new country. How women thought about birth and motherhood, their health, families, child-rearing, and finances was transformed based on geographic location. America was not divided by North and South but in a state-by-state patchwork where women and their fetuses had different rights depending on where they lived. A woman in Wisconsin would have dramatically different choices than one across the border in Minnesota. The ability to receive a specific medical procedure would shift based on where a woman entered a clinic or hospital, or called a doctor. In one state, abortion providers could be put in prison for ninety-nine years; in another, they would be heroes. Disparities had existed for years, given the successful effort to chip away at abortion access in Republican states and for low-income women. Now the court’s opinion made those differences a stark national reality.
“Abortion presents the Court a profound moral question,” Alito wrote for the majority. “The Constitution does not prohibit the citizens of each State from regulating or prohibiting abortion. Roe and Casey arrogated that authority.”
Alito’s decision was steeped in the originalist philosophy, or as he described the legal theory in a 2021 town hall at Thomas Aquinas College, a conservative Catholic private school, the idea that the Constitution “means what people would have understood it to mean at the time it was written.”
The new court majority washed away the “super precedent” of Roe, which had guided so many decades of confirmation hearings. “Precedents should be respected, but sometimes the Court errs, and occasionally the Court issues an important decision that is egregiously wrong,” wrote Alito. “When that happens, stare decisis is not a straitjacket.”
Yet it wasn’t simply one ruling that birthed this new country. The fall of Roe was the culmination of a targeted—and in key moments, startlingly lucky—campaign over a tumultuous decade by an under-the-radar network of elite conservative lawyers, Christian activists, and Republican politicians in key positions of power, built over years. A small but powerful coalition, determined to end abortion rights, conducted a coordinated and sweeping operation across courts and legislatures, Congress and campaigns, to topple Roe and remake American culture. They had found the levers of power and pulled them.
The impact of their work on the nation went far beyond questions of medicine and childbirth. Abortion was the screen onto which the country projected some of its greatest anxieties about religion and family, medicine, and the role of women in American life. For conservatives, abortion rights amounted to the nation abandoning not just state power but also families, unborn children, and morality. For liberals, those rights were the foundation of ensuring women’s status as free and equal citizens, of their right to control their own bodies, and therefore, their destinies.
ALEXIS MCGILL JOHNSON was wrapping up a meeting with the board of Planned Parenthood’s political arm when she heard the news. They’d been planning for the midterm elections and the escalation of threats they expected to come if Republicans retook control of Congress. The group took a break at 10:00 a.m. to engage in what had become a ritual in recent weeks, refreshing the Supreme Court website.
When she saw the decision, fog enveloped her brain. This was not the first time this country had taken rights away from people, she thought. Now it was happening to women. “There is nothing more fascist than taking away people’s right to control their own bodies,” she said. The right, she thought, created a world where “the tyranny of the minority” could dominate.
It felt devastating, watching the court ignore the views of the majority of Americans, she thought. Roe might never have been grounded in real freedom, real equality, she thought. The decision might have been little more than an empty promise for low-income women and women of color since nearly the day it happened. But she saw this outcome—the overturning—as a slide into autocracy. “We are watching the destruction of our democracy in slow motion,” she said.
Nancy Northup was sitting in the Center for Reproductive Rights’ quiet, mostly empty offices in New York. The networks kept calling to get her on TV. But her first thought was her four children. She texted them a simple message: “They did it.”
If the words were expected, the timing was a surprise. Northup, and her whole team, thought the decision would be released the following week and planned for Julie Rikelman to travel from Boston then. She did not understand why the decision came on June 24, not the last week of the term as was typical for major rulings.
Northup had many losses before, but this one felt all-encompassing. Things she had believed had been crumbling in America, like the separation of church and state, and the idea that America was a pluralist country and not a Christian nation, were actually far more unsettled, she thought. Northup had lived her entire reproductive life with Roe as the law, from before she got her first period until after menopause. Her kids were in their twenties. This was about their generation, their reproductive choices, she thought. “They are facing just a dreadful world ahead,” she said.
Cecile Richards was home in her apartment on the Upper West Side when the decision came. The night before she had been on a call with activists in Texas discussing how they would react to the ruling. Despite their preparation, the ruling felt “devastating,” nearly “unimaginable,” she said. She thought of her mother, as she always did in these big moments. The decision of this court indicated opposition to voting rights, LGBTQ rights, and so many other causes that her family held dear, Richards thought. “Abortion is just the canary in the coal mine,” she said. “We’re just the beginning.”
Mini Timmaraju from NARAL called her husband, then texted their nanny and begged her to come over. She had just arrived home in Philadelphia from Washington the night before and had planned to return the next week for the expected decision. Now she rushed to get back to march to the Supreme Court with protesters. She thought about 2016 and all her colleagues who had worked for Hillary Clinton. If the outcome of the election had been different … The memory made her want to punch things. All she could do, she thought, was keep trying to fight.
Her mother sent her a text, moments after the ruling. Chaya Timmaraju was her daughter’s first feminist role model. Timmaraju remembered watching how impressed her mother was with their new country when they moved to Texas from India back in 1979. That was not long before Ann Richards became state treasurer.
“This is no longer a country for women,” her mother wrote. All Timmaraju could muster in response was a heart emoji reaction to the message. It was only then that her tears finally came.
The day unleashed the pent-up momentum of the antiabortion movement. Abortion rights in Republican states fell like dominoes. In Alabama, a federal judge lifted an injunction on the state’s near-total abortion ban, considered the most restrictive abortion law in the country when it passed three years earlier. In South Dakota, a trigger ban from 2005 instantly made performing an abortion or supplying abortion pills a felony, punishable by two years in prison and a fine. In Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin tapped four Republican lawmakers to write a bill banning abortion after fifteen weeks. Old laws banning abortion—even from the Civil War era—could potentially be enforced, carrying mandatory prison sentences. In Oklahoma, where the Republican governor had signed five conflicting abortion bans into law over the past thirteen months, even some legislators were unable to explain what was now illegal.
Lawyers for abortion clinics rushed to file emergency injunctions. Swearing out loud to herself in her home office, Brigitte Amiri, who fought for Jane Doe, called one of her clients in Kentucky, EMW Women’s Surgical Center, and told the clinic workers to turn away the women sitting in the waiting room. “You’ve got to cancel all patients now,” she instructed. Then she rushed to file a lawsuit in Kentucky state court to block the state’s trigger ban.
No one had to read the full 213-page decision or sift through the complex legal arguments to understand what had happened. Americans flooded into city parks and streets and outside federal courthouses. In Phoenix, police deployed tear gas after protesters started banging on the glass of the state capitol. In Silicon Valley, Meta executives issued orders prohibiting employees from openly discussing the ruling, to avoid creating a “hostile work environment.” Other companies—Macy’s, Vox Media, and Goldman Sachs—announced plans to cover travel expenses for employees to get abortions.
For weeks, the White House counsel had told administration aides that the decision could come any day, but that big decisions like this one most often came in the final week of the term before the justices left town for the summer. Her message had filtered through Democratic circles, and it became a kind of gospel that the ruling would be released on the final day. No one knew why it actually came that day, June 24, and not at the end of the term. But almost immediately, there were far more pressing concerns, like getting the president and other top officials before cameras to meet the moment.
Almost no one was ready or in the right position. Joe Biden’s health secretary was touring a Planned Parenthood clinic in Saint Louis when Missouri’s trigger ban was enacted, forcing the center to immediately halt appointments. As a group of House Democrats gathered on the Capitol steps and sang “God Bless America” to celebrate the passage of gun control legislation, shouts from abortion-rights protesters echoed in the background.
At her weekly press conference in the Capitol, a visibly shaken Nancy Pelosi read a poem by the Israeli poet Ehud Manor. “I have no other country even though my land is burning,” she read. “Here is my home. I will not be silent for my country has changed her face.” She repeated the line in a quiet voice. It was the same poem she read after the January 6 siege, during Donald Trump’s second impeachment, when she asked her Republican colleagues to “finally open their eyes and hold this president accountable” before they acquitted him.
When Biden spoke from the White House more than two hours after the ruling was released, a cluster of top female officials double-clutched their cell phones, frantically toggling between their personal and official devices. Their summer Friday outfits—red flowered dresses, bright yellow capris, and striped T-shirts—were a sign of just how unexpected the timing was. For them, it was a moment of mourning, a black suit kind of day, and they were not prepared.
No executive action could restore Roe. Democrats didn’t have the sixty votes in Congress to codify Roe, nor did they have the votes to eliminate the filibuster and pass such a law with their slim majority. The president was impotent to stop the fallout. With few options, Biden reran the same appeal Democrats had been making for decades: protect abortion rights by electing more Democrats. “With your vote, you can act,” he said. “You can have the final word. This is not over.”
The protests outside the Supreme Court sprawled from the steps, guarded by security barriers and armed police, across the Capitol plaza. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tried to rally the crowd through a bullhorn. “What can you do in Congress?” a woman finally shouted. “Right now, elections are not enough,” Ocasio-Cortez replied. “We have to fill the streets.”
But filling the streets could accomplish very little. By the end of the day, abortion would be illegal in at least eight states. Within three months, the procedure would be banned or limited in seventeen states. On June 24, 2022, there were about 65 million women of childbearing age in America. Within two months of the decision, about one-third—20.9 million—would live in states where abortion was a criminal act.
None of this came as a shock to one Democrat, whose vision for the nation had promised another direction. Hillary Clinton read Alito’s words in frozen fury. The decision was, in her legal opinion, “terrible,” “poorly reasoned,” and “historically inaccurate,” she said. Its meaning to her was clear: women were not equal.
“It says that we are not equal citizens,” she said. “It says that we don’t have autonomy, agency, and privacy to make the most personal of decisions. It says that we should be rethinking our lives and our roles in the world.”
As secretary of state, Clinton had tried, in the best way she knew how, to protect Roe, not only in America but across the globe. She warned of what was coming when she ran against Trump, even when she was dismissed as alarmist or hysterical. But now it was undeniable. Democrats had failed.
“One thing I give the right credit for is they never give up. They are relentless. You know, they take a loss, they get back up, they regroup, they raise more money.” She added: “We have nothing like it on our side.”
Clinton thought about how the three Trump justices answered questions about Roe in their confirmation hearings, testifying about precedent and suggesting the ruling was not at risk. “They just flat out lied. And Democrats did nothing in the Senate,” she said. Those justices, she said, “were all teed up to do the bidding of political, ideological, religious organizations and leaders that they are beholden to. It’s just truly remarkable.”
Yet she understood why it was so hard for many Democrats to see what was happening along the way, how they could so easily suspend disbelief even as the evidence grew all around them. It seemed contrary to the last half century of law, the rulings that legalized contraception and same-sex marriage. It defied what she believed were the rights of women and rights of privacy.
“We didn’t take it seriously and we didn’t understand the threat,” she said. “Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country.”
TWENTY-SIX MINUTES AFTER the ruling, Marjorie Dannenfelser got a text from Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state under Trump—“The Lord is good.” Soon a flurry of missed calls back and forth from Mike Pence, Leonard Leo, Lynn Fitch, and Mississippi governor Tate Reeves. The RNC blasted out an email that could have been her own views: “Americans overwhelmingly support pro-life policies.” But the most meaningful message was just two words. It was from her father: “You won!” It made her emotional. Her father, the doctor, now eighty-nine, still disagreed with her and still loved her. For her, it was a family story after all, leaving her Southern Episcopal family for this cause they had opposed, for a God they had not understood.
The ruling felt like an answer to prayer for many in the movement, going back to John C. Willke’s vision so long ago. The national right to abortion disappeared at 10:10 a.m., as the pages of the decision were uploaded to the Supreme Court’s website. Even the exact time felt like a sign for true antiabortion believers. They texted one another the words of Jesus, found in Bible verse John 10:10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
Across the country in Orange County, California, David Daleiden remembered his Planned Parenthood video sting as he drove down the freeway. He turned on an ancient Gregorian chant, rolled down his windows, and raised the volume for all to hear: “Te Deum laudamus,” or “God, we praise you.”
Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life declared that the total abolition of abortion would be next. “Today, life won,” Pence proclaimed, calling for a national abortion ban. Mitch McConnell said the court “corrected a terrible legal and moral error, like when Brown v. Board overruled Plessy v. Ferguson.”
Even Trump, who had been mute after the leak, took a victory lap, applauding himself for appointing the three conservative justices. “I think, in the end, this is something that will work out for everybody,” he said in an interview on Fox News.
When Roe was established in 1973, front-page columns of The New York Times and other major newspapers headlined the reaction of Catholic cardinals. Half a century later, it was not official church leaders but the laypeople—the conservative politicians, and activists—who stood at the forefront. The church’s social and political power had transferred from bishops to the enormously powerful, if small, group of conservative Catholic operators like Leo, Dannenfelser, and Hawkins who worked outside official religious structures. The shift revealed how the societal clout of the official Catholic Church hierarchy had diminished over the past fifty years, even as the power and ideological hold of its conservative wing grew stronger. Now Catholics and conservative evangelicals were merging not on religious grounds but around political ideology, fueling the Trump movement and setting out to transform America.
ADF’s and Mississippi’s teams pumped out op-eds and interviews framing the decision as a win for democratic values. Dobbs remade more than law; it remade the national view of motherhood, Erin Hawley said on Fox News. “This decision doesn’t take rights away from women,” she said. “It allows states to protect the unborn—and also to empower women.”
Fitch declared the victory was not just for women but for the court itself. “The task now falls to us to advocate for the laws that empower women—laws that promote fairness in child support and enhance enforcement of it, laws for childcare and workplace policies that support families, and laws that improve foster care and adoption,” she said. It was a tacit acknowledgment that a number of low-income women, who could not afford to travel out of state for an abortion, would be forced into motherhood without the resources to care for their children.
Inside Dannenfelser’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia—newly renamed Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America to reflect their new fight—staff busted out a bottle of Dom Pérignon that a donor had sent a few years back. They had saved it for this moment. A team alerted Dannenfelser each time another state’s trigger law went into effect.
She watched the scenes of women protesting at the court. Dannenfelser saw the ruling as a legal victory built on years of changing the culture. It was a mission that could be traced from Willke and his wife’s speaking tour through church basements to the online exposé of Planned Parenthood videos, to the broadcasting of their message from Trump’s bully pulpit. In that telling, Dobbs was the result of a passionate grassroots transformation of the hearts and minds of America. “The experience of abortion was not the great liberator that women were told it was going to be,” she said. “They’ve never acknowledged that there were two people to contend with in any unexpected pregnancy.”
But American support for Roe had never changed. This was a story of planning, to be sure, of a broad network pulling together across courts and country to change the nation. But Dannenfelser’s win—their win—was also due to a series of extraordinary lucky breaks from shocking deaths on the highest court, a surprise presidential victory, and opponents who did not realize the true stakes until it was too late.
Before heading over to the Fox News studios to appear on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Dannenfelser plopped into a red leather booth at a nearby restaurant and chatted with Frank Cannon, her strategist who had vowed with her to fight their way back into the Republican Party after Obama won reelection. So much had changed over ten years. She thought of her daughter with special needs. Just this week, she had graduated and gone to the prom. If it had not been for her, Dannenfelser said, she might have given up years ago.
She reflected back to 1992, when her movement lost Casey and when SBA began. “Each time that there was a problem, we got stronger,” she said. “And that is not humanly possible. I don’t think we could have done that without the aid of the Holy Spirit.”
Dannenfelser recited words from Henry Hyde, the creator of the Hyde Amendment that the reproductive justice movement fought for so many decades. It was a fragment of one of his old speeches that she had printed on the wall of her conference room, about meeting God after death. “‘When the time comes as it surely will when we face that awesome moment, the Final Judgment, I’ve often thought, as Fulton Sheen wrote, that it’s a terrible moment of loneliness,” she said. “You have no advocates. You’re there alone, standing before God and a terror will rip through your soul like nothing you can imagine. But I really think that those in the pro-life movement will not be alone.” She choked up.
“I think there’ll be a chorus of voices that have never been heard in this world, but are heard beautifully and clearly in the next world. And they will—” She struggled to continue, her voice breaking. “They’ll plead for everyone who has been in this movement. They will say to God, ‘Spare him, because he loved us.’”
She grabbed her things to leave as ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” played over the restaurant’s speakers. In this post-Roe country, Dannenfelser believed not just the laws but the politics of abortion would eventually shift in her favor. Democrats who opposed abortion would reappear over the next decade, she thought, emboldened to share their true views by the court’s ruling. With Roe gone, she believed that America would finally build their culture of life, as more voters would realize they were supporting morality and human decency. That was the nation Dannenfelser saw coming.
IF THE SUPREME Court leak had shocked Americans, the decision’s final text was a revolution of its own. Dobbs was more than a cut-and-dried legal opinion. It was a declaration, written in the language of the movement that created this new future. Where Roe discussed the fetus as the “potentiality of human life,” Dobbs now referenced the “unborn human being”—the language of the Mississippi law. A footnote cited research from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the think tank founded by SBA to provide studies and research to bolster their cause.
The outcome on June 24 was not simply a fait accompli when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and Amy Coney Barrett joined the court. Behind closed doors, the justices debated fiercely. Roberts was a holdout, as suggested in The Wall Street Journal and Politico. If he convinced another conservative justice to join him, there would be no majority, and his opinion would control the deeply fractured decision. He tried to win over Kavanaugh to his fifteen-week compromise position and worked with Breyer, the liberal justice nominated by Bill Clinton, who considered joining Roberts to preserve some form of Roe.
The antiabortion forces had argued against Kavanaugh’s selection to the court, hoping for Barrett instead. Yet in the final count, he was their pivotal ally. When Kavanaugh convinced the court to adopt his plan to keep the case a secret for four months, Barrett initially agreed. But then, sometime before the public announcement, she changed her mind, voting against taking up the case at all.
Ultimately, it didn’t matter: the court needed only four justices to agree to hear the case. It was Kavanaugh who provided the fourth vote. Those four men—Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh—overruled the concerns of the court’s three women, including the one woman in their own ranks, the pride of the conservative antiabortion movement and the only mother among all the justices. And despite what Senator Susan Collins said Kavanaugh had promised in their private meeting—his assurances that he would respect the precedent of Roe—when offered the option of a compromise, he refused Roberts and sided with the bare majority voting to overturn Roe altogether.
Roberts wrote a concurring opinion that he would have taken “a more measured course”—upholding Mississippi’s fifteen-week ban but leaving Roe alone. “Surely we should adhere closely to principles of judicial restraint here, where the broader path the Court chooses entails repudiating a constitutional right we have not only previously recognized, but also expressly reaffirmed applying the doctrine of stare decisis,” Roberts wrote in his own concurring opinion. “The Court’s opinion is thoughtful and thorough, but those virtues cannot compensate for the fact that its dramatic and consequential ruling is unnecessary to decide the case before us.”
In the final count, it was the Trump justices—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett—who gave Alito and Thomas the majority to overturn Roe. If Ginsburg had lived another four months and two days, the ruling would have almost certainly been 5–4 in the other direction—if the court had even taken up the case. This reality was not lost on much of the country, which had lived through three polarizing confirmation hearings over four years. When asked in surveys, nearly six in ten Americans said they believed the decision was “mostly based on politics”—not in the law. For many Americans, the speed of the upending of Roe, less than two years after Republicans procured their conservative majority on the court, undercut their belief that the court was impartial.
Alito saw it differently from much of America. To him, the court was creating a better, more equal America by correcting a moral wrong. He compared the ruling to Brown v. Board of Education, equating overturning abortion rights with ending racial segregation. There were significant differences: Brown expanded rights for existing classes of citizens; Dobbs curtailed them. Brown aligned with public opinion; Dobbs flouted it. But perhaps most significantly, the court agreed on Brown, ruling unanimously to overturn that precedent. The consensus sent the message that the decision was based on strong legal reasoning that stretched across ideological lines—not just the politics of the parties that voted the justices onto the court.
But in this decision, this court was fiercely divided. For the liberal members, an America without abortion rights was not a country they recognized, as they made clear in a scathing and sorrowful dissent. By eviscerating Roe, the court essentially ruled that a state could force a woman to give birth, transforming “what, when freely undertaken, is a wonder into what, when forced, may be a nightmare,” Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan wrote. Some rights, they argued, were too valuable to be entrusted to voters and majority rule. “Even in the face of public opposition, we uphold the right of individuals—yes, including women—to make their own choices and chart their own futures,” they wrote. “Or at least, we did once.”
While the dissenters anticipated a darker future, the majority opinion looked to the past. Roe had been rooted in an evolving concept of liberty, an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, which granted all citizens “equal protection of the laws.” To reexamine the legal basis for Roe, Alito delved into British common law starting in the 1200s and moving through the centuries, citing treatises written in outdated English—“abortion of a quick child was ‘murder’ if the ‘childe be born alive’ and a ‘great misprision’ if the ‘childe dieth in her body,’” he wrote, referencing a seventeenth-century legal writing. He devoted particular attention to the mid-1800s, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified. During that period in American history, states passed a series of restrictions on abortion rooted in the values of female purity, submissiveness, and Christian piety of the Victorian Age.
Alito devoted pages to the laws passed before 1868 and little more than a paragraph to the laws that came after. For the decades of the early republic, abortion had been largely permitted until “the quickening”—the time when fetal movement is detected by a woman, typically around fourteen to twenty weeks into a pregnancy. Still, Alito’s findings were clear: “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.”
In some ways, it was not a surprising conclusion. The men who shaped English common law and wrote the Fourteenth Amendment did not view women as full and equal citizens. At the time, women had no legal existence separate from their husbands. They could not vote or, in most states, own land. A husband could rape or beat his wife with no legal consequences because she was considered part of her husband’s property. Women’s economic and legal freedom, their very bodily autonomy, would not come until the 1960s and 1970s, with rulings granting a constitutional right to use birth control and have an abortion.
And it wasn’t just abortion rights that weren’t “deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions.” There were a number of what legal scholars called “unenumerated rights” that were not explicitly articulated in the Constitution but that previous courts had judged to be an extension of the right to liberty in the Fourteenth Amendment. Assessed through the thinking of the 1800s, contraception, interracial marriage, and same-sex unions were not “deeply rooted” in the founding documents. All—like equality for women—were rights that came centuries after the crafting of the Constitution.
Alito tried to reassure Americans that those other legal precedents were not at risk by his opinion. “Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion,” he wrote. But that position didn’t track with the legal reasoning of his writings, as Thomas made clear in a frank concurring opinion. “In future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents,” he wrote, listing decisions that guaranteed rights to same-sex intercourse and marriage, and contraception.
But the law is based on logic—not assurances, as the liberal justices pointed out. Future courts would be governed by Alito’s reasoning, not one sentence in his 108-page decision. Already, they noted, some conservative lawmakers were pushing to move a right to contraception from being grounded in the Fourteenth Amendment to being regulated by states. “Rights can contract,” the dissenters warned. “We cannot understand how anyone can be confident that today’s opinion will be the last of its kind.”
THE NIGHT OF June 24, Dannenfelser left the Fox television studio, after filming an interview with Tucker Carlson, and got into her security detail’s truck. She worried about people finding her home address. They pulled away, the Capitol large and white against the black sky.
At a crosswalk out beyond the windshield, three young women stepped into the headlights. They carried signs, homemade with markers, to protest the decision Dannenfelser had devoted her life to winning. The first grabbed the hand of the second, who reached out for the hand of the third. They crossed together, and disappeared into the night.
Dannenfelser got a text. It was Father Paul Scalia, Justice Antonin Scalia’s son. She read it out loud: “At long last, Thanks be to God.”
It was a day she could only have imagined all those decades ago at Duke, when she wrote a letter to the school newspaper and publicly declared her life’s new mission.
Forgotten to history was the other letter, the one that pushed Dannenfelser to write in the first place, from a woman she did not remember.
That letter was written by another student, Stacy Pollina. Back then, Pollina marched with friends in a Take Back the Night campaign, to protect women after a string of sexual assaults on campus. After graduation, she became a midwife, hoping to do everything she could to help women get pregnancy care where it seemed most urgent. She worked with immigrants and low-income families. By the time of the Dobbs ruling, she led a reproductive and sexual health program at a community health center, in a tiny town on the rural coast of Northern California.
Abortion would remain legal in California in this new America. But even that didn’t mean accessing it was easy—nor, for that matter was getting any obstetrics care at all in Pollina’s community. The local hospital—the California-based Adventist Health—was a faith-based system affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which opposed abortion in almost all circumstances. There was a Planned Parenthood down the street. But it only performed abortions until about twelve weeks of pregnancy. If a woman needed a surgical abortion, she had to go to another clinic two and a half hours away. At the local high school graduation ceremony every year, Pollina watched girls cross the stage and counted the ones she had helped to get an abortion so each could finish her education.
Pollina had voted for Hillary Clinton. She had worried when McConnell held open Scalia’s seat, refusing to hold hearings for Merrick Garland. But as the court changed in Washington and Mississippi passed its ban, she kept doing the work she could thousands of miles away, helping women directly, hoping to make a difference. Roe fell anyway.
She reread her letter to the Duke paper from thirty-five years ago. “To make abortion illegal is only to rape women of what freedom they already have—the freedom to choose to have an abortion or not, in accordance with their own moral values,” Pollina read. “To make it illegal is to impose certain moral values upon every women in the form of control over her body through legislation.”
Pollina didn’t remember writing the letter, and she did not remember that a senior then named Marjorie Jones wrote a letter in response. In fact, she didn’t remember Dannenfelser at all.
She pulled up Dannenfelser’s bio on Wikipedia and grew quiet. “This is what I’ve done,” she said. “And she’s done a little bit more.”