The reality was that Roe did not just fall once, on June 24, 2022. Roe collapsed over a transformational decade. Roe fell when Texas enacted its near-total abortion ban and turned neighbors into citizen law enforcers. It fell when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died during the Days of Awe and Amy Coney Barrett took her place. It fell when the Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh over Christine Blasey Ford’s objections. When Jane Doe was initially denied an abortion. When Mike Pence worked to craft the Trump administration in his image. When Donald Trump survived “Grab ’em by the pussy” and was elected president. When Mississippi had just a single abortion clinic. When Wendy Davis’s filibuster was interpreted as a victory, but was actually a defeat. Roe fell the day Marjorie Dannenfelser left that conference room, determined to fight back into the Republican Party that tried to kick her out.
Perhaps Roe was even falling the day it was decided, when John C. Willke and a small band of conservative Catholics decided to take it down. Nationally, the fall of Roe was the triumph of a minority view over a country that didn’t fully understand the battle until it had all but lost.
It was a unique story but also, in some ways, a classically American one. Passionate minorities have changed the direction of the country since the founding. A small group of suffragists in white eventually gave women the right to vote. A coalition of Black pastors, students, and community leaders led the battle for civil rights protections. Gay activists cast equality as love and won the right to marry. Now an overwhelmingly Christian minority, who believed that a fetus should have the same fundamental rights as born humans, brought the end of Roe. They saw their win as a civil rights victory equal to those of the past.
But the essence of this battle was fundamentally different. The fetus was inextricably tied to the woman. Rights for one inherently meant fewer freedoms for another. Unlike those other fights—for gay rights, civil rights, and women’s rights—the fall of Roe was a contraction of rights for women, not an expansion.
The antiabortion activists did not win by opening American hearts and minds to their cause, as those other activists did. Not a single state had a majority of adults that favored overturning Roe. Even in Mississippi, only 40 percent agreed with the court’s decision. Nor did they convince large numbers of women to stop getting abortions: data suggested that legal abortions likely increased in the first six months of 2023, as tens of thousands of women crossed state lines to procure the procedure and access to medication abortion by telemedicine increased. Their victory was an undoing of what vast national majorities supported.
The antiabortion movement succeeded because most people did not believe it would. For all its efforts over the decades, it did not convert broad swaths of the country to its beliefs, even as Americans held complicated views about the details of abortion. Americans simply did not believe that a right that had become so integral to their understanding of women’s lives, liberty, and their pursuit of happiness could disappear in the pages of a legal opinion. Widespread denial proved more powerful than the reality of a changing country, where conservative states were moving in great numbers to ban abortion. And then suddenly, the spell was broken.
With that one sentence in Dobbs, the Roe era in America ended. Roe had been decided at the end of its own transformational ten-year period, one in which the court expanded voting rights and instituted affirmative action. And it fell as those landmark laws and policies were being challenged, at the Supreme Court and by the rightward shift of Republican politics. Roe was decided when America was a majority white, Christian nation, in the early days of the sexual revolution transforming gender relations. It fell in a different America, one that was increasingly secular, religiously unaffiliated, and racially and sexually diverse.
For so many decades, the foundation of the discussion over women’s rights and sexuality had been Roe. Now that was shattered. A new period began, and the nation was being remade in real time. From politics to medicine to law to the antiabortion movement itself, forces that had long been constant in American life were suddenly scrambled.
The fall of Roe marked the symbolic inauguration of a new generation of the religious right, a post-Roe movement that was more radical than the one that preceded it. Many of these activists saw their cause as intertwined with the broader swath of concerns animating Trump’s Republican Party, issues like election denialism, eradicating transgender rights, and limiting what schools could teach about race and inequity. After Dobbs, the lawyers at ADF turned their attention to limiting rights for transgender people, using the legislation-to-court-to-culture pipeline that was the backbone of their anti-Roe strategy.
This new Christian legal movement had reached political maturity and gained power from statehouses to Congress. In late 2023 when Republicans failed over and over to successfully elect a Speaker of the US House of Representatives—a position second in line to the presidency—they finally agreed on a little-known congressman from Louisiana, Mike Johnson, who had worked as a lawyer for ADF. “I’m a Bible-believing Christian. I believe in the sanctity of every single human life,” he said in an early interview with Fox News. “Until recently, actually, almost all of our nation’s leaders openly acknowledged that they were also Bible-believing Christians.”
Yet after Dobbs, ADF and its allies no longer benefited from the veil of denial that they would succeed. After the decision, views on abortion shifted rapidly. Nearly 70 percent of the country believed that abortion should be legal in the first three months of pregnancy, a record high. A majority said the procedure was “morally acceptable.”
In a heartbeat, everything had changed. The laws that ADF helped usher in had been written as a litigation strategy, not as actual policy. Other bills had been crafted largely as political messaging, never expected to become actual law in a world without Roe. When they were instituted after Dobbs, they opened new questions over what dire circumstance qualified for a medical exception, and what procedures, exactly, remained legal.
What was once only theoretical to many Americans became startlingly real as stories of women and girls confronting difficult choices became public. The nation was plunged into the detailed reality of pregnancy, engaging in political and medical conversations that would have once seemed unimaginable. There were debates over ectopic pregnancies and miscarriage care, with frank descriptions of heavy bleeding and life-threatening complications. Graphic discussions happened in state legislatures over sexual assault and campaign ads featuring survivors of child rape. Hospitals in Republican states formed committees that debated whether providing each medically necessary abortion would trigger legal action under the new laws. And parents had quiet conversations about sending students—boys and girls—to college with packs of abortion pills in states where the procedure was prohibited. Even the term itself was reconsidered, as women realized the “termination” of their nonviable pregnancy had actually been something else entirely: an abortion.
Suddenly, it was Democrats who had political energy on their side. The abortion rights majority—a coalition of Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans—was silent no longer. Alito had written in his decision that “women are not without electoral or political power.” Now, they used that power to push back.
The 2022 midterm elections marked the best midterm result for a president’s party in two decades. In Michigan, where an abortion-rights referendum was on the ballot, Democrats won full control of state government for the first time in forty years. In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Nevada, Democrats staved off an expected red wave in key races. Voters in five states voted to expand or protect abortion rights through ballot measures. And the Republican candidates who embodied the post-Roe religious right, even calling for the end of the separation of church and state, largely lost their races, some failing to survive even primaries within their own parties. The message Ilyse Hogue had pushed before the 2020 election—that abortion rights were a fundamental freedom—had become the dominant argument of her party, echoed from statehouses to the White House. NARAL, the organization she once led, even changed its name to Reproductive Freedom for All, an effort intended to reflect its expanded coalition and the stakes of the new fight.
Not every Democrat won in 2022. In Texas, Rochelle Garza, the attorney who had defended Jane Doe, lost her race to oust Texas attorney general Ken Paxton by nearly ten points, leaving Paxton in place to continue defending Texas’s strict bans. Still, for the antiabortion movement, the overall results were a low point reminiscent of the one after 2012, when it felt like Republicans were trying to push them out of the party with the autopsy.
Abortion had transformed from a motivating issue for the conservative base to a political liability for Republicans with independent and moderate voters. Trump publicly distanced himself from the cause, blaming the antiabortion movement that helped boost him to the White House for the party’s midterm defeats. And even SBA’s donors began to waver. Most had supported the organization not because they were fervently against abortion but because they saw the group as an asset for Republican victories, which now it was seemingly not. SBA urged its allied lawmakers to move carefully: in a private strategy call just weeks before the midterm elections, the organization counseled lawmakers in Tennessee to wait several years before considering laws that would regulate IVF and contraception. But there were plenty of signs that their movement had moved beyond them. In Alabama, it only took twenty months for a state Supreme Court to rule that frozen embryos should legally be considered children, prompting some clinics in the state to halt IVF procedures and sparking a national panic over the possible widespread loss of fertility treatments.
Leonard Leo and the conservative justices also paid a political price for the decision, as they faced new scrutiny from the public, the media, and Congress. Senate Democrats and reporters dug into the justices’ finances, discovering that Justices Alito and Thomas had accepted gifts and trips and gave paid speeches—the sum of which was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the first time, the Supreme Court adopted an ethics code, but the policy did not have an enforcement mechanism. And as part of its investigation, the Senate Judiciary Committee authorized a subpoena of Leo. He refused to participate. “Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats have been destroying the Supreme Court; now they are destroying the Senate. I will not cooperate with this unlawful campaign of political retribution,” he said in a statement.
To Clinton, it seemed like a good start. For years, Democrats failed to “invest in the kind of parallel institutions” to the conservative legal establishment, she believed. “We could have done a much better job exposing Leonard Leo, exposing the Federalist Society, exposing their mission, their movement to overturn Roe v. Wade,” Clinton said. Democrats were still relatively powerless to stop the new antiabortion regime. The federal standard set by Dobbs was the law of the land. Even Julie Rikelman, the Center for Reproductive Rights’ lawyer who argued Dobbs, whom Joe Biden picked as a federal circuit court judge in Boston, promised to “apply Dobbs faithfully” in her confirmation hearings, as she was required to follow new Supreme Court precedent.
Even with Democratic control of the Senate, Biden was limited in what he could do. In the months after Dobbs, Congress codified protections for same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into federal law, but Democrats could not get the votes to do the same for abortion rights. The White House determined it had reached the legal limits of its powers by the end of the summer, after issuing a series of executive orders. During the midterm campaign, Biden publicly vowed that the first bill he would send to Congress after the election would be one enshrining abortion rights in federal law. It was a promise Democrats would be unable to fulfill, given that Republicans kept their narrow majority in the House. In the first post-Roe State of the Union address in 2023, Biden spent roughly forty-two seconds of his seventy-two-minute address on the topic—a quiet admission of the limits of his power to restore federal abortion rights. And almost two years after Dobbs, as he headed into his reelection campaign, Biden still had not held a formal White House meeting with the heads of the abortion-rights organizations.
Indeed, even as the antiabortion movement seemed to lose the immediate political fight, there was little question that it had reshaped the country. A year after the decision, 17.5 million women of reproductive age lived in fourteen states where abortion was completely or mostly banned. In another seven states, abortion bans had been passed but were blocked by the courts. At the local level, the tactics that led to the Texas law spread across the country, as a growing constellation of conservative cities and counties passed local ordinances to effectively ban abortion within their borders.
For every step its opponents made, the antiabortion network pushed back in statehouses and the courts. Democrats celebrated the success of a ballot measure in Ohio that enshrined abortion rights in their state constitution in 2023, defeating an $18 million effort by a Leonard Leo–affiliated group. But as they did, antiabortion groups sued in Michigan, attempting to overturn the constitutional provisions that voters there passed in a similar measure the year before. “I think we’re farther than anyone would have expected we would be,” said Kristan Hawkins on the year anniversary of the ruling. “But am I complacent with that? Hell no.”
The post-Roe world also scrambled the movement that ushered it in. Before the decision, some Republicans talked about embracing proposals like expanded child tax credits, expanded prenatal care and maternity leave, and even direct payments to families with young children. Those plans were a tacit acknowledgment of the future that would be arriving fast. With abortion soon to be illegal or tightly restricted in half the country, tens of thousands more babies would be born to parents struggling to afford housing, health care, food, and childcare.
When that future came, Republican leaders focused less on concrete help for the new babies that would now be born and more on the political crisis at hand. “Pro-life” had become synonymous with abortion bans, internal polling by Republican strategists found. In private memos and closed-door meetings, they urged Republican candidates to talk instead about “common-sense restrictions” and “compassionate exceptions” for rape, incest, and life of the mother. Dannenfelser tried to rally their party around a national fifteen-week ban, which she and her allies framed as “a reasonable fifteen-week limit.” It was a way to cast a stricter restriction—five weeks earlier than the twenty-week ban their cause once pushed in Congress—as a compromise stance.
Just like Mississippi’s fifteen-week law, their proposal did not grow first from health or science, though it argued that was the point in pregnancy when a fetus could feel pain—a claim that continued to be widely discredited by the mainstream medical establishment. Nor would it stop the vast majority of abortions, given that more than 93 percent happen before that stage in pregnancy. Rather, fifteen weeks was the point at which polling showed a majority of voters said they might consider limitations. But in this new post-Roe era, those kinds of tactics didn’t work as well as they once did. Independent and Democratic voters now understood the ultimate goal to be banning all abortion.
The new, fifteen-week positioning was also a compromise that many in the antiabortion movement were no longer willing to accept. Hawkins pushed for the abolition of all abortion and still wanted Congress to ban abortion as early as possible, at around six weeks of pregnancy. She wasn’t worried about what was politically possible or would help their allies win elections. At lunch with Dannenfelser before the midterm election, Hawkins compared their split views to divisions among leaders of the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements, in the final years before those victories. In each case, she told Dannenfelser, there was a more established leader, plotting carefully and methodically toward the goal, but there was also the more extreme leader of an allied group who came in near the end and demanded uncompromising change. In this analogy, Hawkins was the radical. “They felt that these activists were messing things up for them, that they were speeding up the timeline too fast, or that they didn’t have all the pieces in place,” she said. “I’m like, oh my gosh, that is literally the argument.”
The post-Roe activists were ready to take their birthright and control the movement. They had fought for this new world, one where they no longer had to accept incremental advancement. For years, allies had told Hawkins to stop saying they would overturn Roe, that the goal sounded “politically naive” and was “giving people false hope,” she said. But history had proved them wrong, and with Roe gone, she wanted more. Not just banning surgical abortions after fifteen weeks but all of it—abortion pills, morning-after pills, birth control pills, and IUDs. She wanted a museum of abortion in Washington to accompany the Holocaust Museum.
Just as Dannenfelser had her supporters in the Republican Party establishment, Hawkins and the post-Roe generation had powerful allies too. The same lawyers who pushed the fall of Roe were at the vanguard of the next fight. Ten days after abortion cost Republicans in the midterm elections, ADF filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of Texas asking the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its 23-year-old approval of mifepristone, the first pill in the two-drug medication abortion regimen, which is also a standard drug used in miscarriage care. Leo’s web of dark money groups helped fund the antiabortion organizations, which were the plaintiffs—and ADF’s clients.
As part of the case, ADF lawyers resurrected the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old law that made it a federal crime to mail or deliver “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” material, specifically any item related to an abortion or birth control. It was the same law that ensnared Margaret Sanger, back in 1916 when she opened her first clinic in Brooklyn, selling instructions on using birth control for ten cents a pamphlet. Roe had largely turned the law into an unconstitutional relic, but now it was back—an old weapon made new. Over the months that followed, the Supreme Court announced it would take up the case. Trump allies began planning how they could enforce the old law, effectively instituting a national abortion ban, through the Department of Justice if he won a second term. It would be a version of the work through executive actions they did during his administration, just supercharged for this new era.
Whatever the court’s decision and whoever won the 2024 presidential election, it was clear that the case would not mark the end of the post-Roe religious right’s legal and political efforts to roll back America’s cultural transformation. If its efforts with Roe showed America anything, it was that its success never depended on just one argument. Even with federal abortion rights gone, the new, post-Roe religious right was using the same tactics: an overwhelming, unrelenting march to banning all abortion and beyond. But in this new decade, they would face a far more potent opposition from a newly energized left, now fully aware of the new reality revealed by the fall of Roe.
What is less certain is how the court will assess these arguments in the decades to come. Or even if plaintiffs will be arguing before the same court. The tumultuous events of the past decade showed that for all the careful legal planning, even the Supreme Court was limited by another marker of human life: its end.