THE FALL OF ROE: The Rise of a New America, by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer
In 2020, a writer at the feminist website Jezebel pitched an article on abortion pills. Her editor liked the idea, but knew what those of us who have tried to write about reproductive access had long internalized: The piece would not do well.
It was a known fact that readers at even the most progressive publications tended to disengage from narratives about abortion. Yes, the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade had been under attack for decades, but as the New York Times journalists Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer explain in their agonizing new book on its reversal, “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America,” few believed it was at real risk. To most Democrats, abortion rights were an afterthought; established in legal precedent and thus low on the list of legislative priorities.
It’s that phenomenon — of Democrats’ unearned belief in the resilience of Roe, even as a coalition of Republicans focused on its collapse with evangelical fervor — that Dias and Lerer take on.
Focused on the decade between the 2012 re-election of Barack Obama and the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in 2022, the book tracks ideological and political shifts — and charts a fervent crusade. With masterly, white-hot reporting, the authors detail how a sophisticated conservative apparatus made Dobbs possible, despite its architects’ full awareness that most Americans were opposed to their mission.
Six justices moved to unravel Roe, but Dias and Lerer are at least as concerned with the motivation of characters whose names are less well known.
In many of the book’s best sections, the personal is political. Dias and Lerer detail the conversion of Marjorie Dannenfelser, who found Catholicism in college, renounced her support of abortion rights, and went on to run one of the most prominent anti-abortion organizations in America.
At several points, they return to the trauma that strengthened the conservative activist Leonard Leo’s resolve to defeat Roe: His eldest child, Margaret, was diagnosed in utero with a severe form of spina bifida, and died when she was 14.
In the chapter that recounts the 13-hour filibuster that the then Texas state senator Wendy Davis undertook to halt a restrictive 2013 abortion bill, Dias and Lerer tell of Davis’s decision to terminate a desperately wanted pregnancy after a devastating diagnosis. The portraits are searing and intimate.
As someone with pro-choice convictions, I read “The Fall of Roe” the way wimps watch horror movies. The jump scares, I anticipated: There isn’t a reader of this book who doesn’t know how it ends. But I felt the truest and most exquisite terror at 9 words printed in the book’s last section. Not long after Joe Biden was inaugurated in 2021, the Supreme Court — stacked with three new Trump appointees — allowed a radical Texas law to take effect. Roe was still the ostensible law of the land — but it didn’t matter. The “problem Democrats faced was simple,” Lerer and Dias write. “They were too late.”
“The Fall of Roe” revisits some well-trod material: the fracas over the Supreme Court seat that sat vacant after the death of Antonin Scalia; the 2016 presidential race.But it’s a credit to the writers that “The Fall of Roe” makes even familiar revelations sting anew. While it is no secret that Democrats were ill prepared for the anti-abortion offensive, the rage of Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic representative from Michigan, feels fresh even today. “In 50 years of Roe being on the books as legal precedent, we had never codified it in law,” she stormed. “The other side for 50 years has had a legal strategy — where is our 50-year strategy?”
After Dobbs, the owner of the Jackson Women’s Health Organization in Mississippi sold the building, known to its supporters as the Pink House, and reconstructed it in New Mexico. Diane Derzis christened her new clinic Pink House West. From her perch in a relatively reliable haven for abortion access, Derzis watched as Dobbs spurred a cascade of abortion rights victories.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade was credited with securing the best midterm results for the party of a sitting president in two decades. In all seven states in which abortion access has been put to a direct vote since, it has won. In November, more states will vote on their own referendums; several are expected to succeed.
Dias and Lerer write that in a private call, Marjorie Dannenfelser’s organization counseled lawmakers in Tennessee to wait a session or two before introducing bills that would regulate I.V.F. and contraception — but the movement seems uninterested in their marching orders. In 2024, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos should be considered children and people could therefore be held liable for destroying them. The decision forced fertility clinics in the state to halt their work and barred families from accessing their own genetic material. Just after the midterm elections in 2022, the Alliance Defending Freedom filed a lawsuit to compel the F.D.A. to revoke its decades-old approval of one of the two pills that initiate a medication abortion.
The Supreme Court has taken up the case, and it is expected to rule soon.
THE FALL OF ROE: The Rise of a New America | By Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer | Flatiron | 433 pp. | $32.99
