How Conservatives Plotted Roe’s Downfall for Years, in Plain Sight

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.

So the Jezebel writer tried a different tack. She published more than 2,000 words under the headline: “This Is a Story About Abortion, No One Will Read It.” Two years later, Roe was gone.

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.