Four years on from the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, we are still making sense of that loss. Amy Littlefield, the abortion rights correspondent at The Nation, has for more than a decade reported on the people and players responsible. In her new book, Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, Littlefield traces how they did it and who their accomplices were along the way. “Studying their playbook showed me they hadn’t done anything special,” she writes of anti-abortion movement figures. As it turns out, there was no unique genius behind the long campaign to end abortion rights but rather a strange, shifting constellation of power players and little-known true believers. What distinguishes Roe’s killers is their willingness to go all in on ideas far outside even their own side’s mainstream, as Littlefield argues, and their skill in exploiting their foes’ vulnerabilities.
Littlefield and I spoke in May about how Roe became so vulnerable in the first place, what we can learn from its demise, and the cost of people accepting, as Littlefield told me, “that there’s one set of rights for folks who are low income, for people of color, for folks who are on the margins, and then there’s another set of laws and policies for the rest of us.”
Melissa Gira Grant: There are still people who think that it’s completely shocking that we lost Roe. What do you think led people to feel as if Dobbs came out of nowhere, when in fact we had been losing Roe for decades?
Amy Littlefield: What most stood in the way of people’s ability to recognize the incremental death of abortion rights—and the fact that Roe v. Wade itself was going to fall—is a lack of awareness within mainstream media, and also mainstream progressive and pro-choice organizations, of just how profoundly race and class and geography shaped people’s lives, including their ability to access an abortion.
The Hyde Amendment was first passed in 1976, and in a way, a huge part of the fight was over right then, because this meant that low-income people for the most part were going to have to fundraise hundreds if not thousands of dollars out of pocket for an abortion. The fact that an estimated more than one million people have been unable to do so and have given birth as a result should be at the center of our abortion politics. Roe v. Wade was extremely meaningful for people who had access to wealth and privilege, more than it was for people who were poor, or who were Black, or who lived many hundreds of miles from the nearest abortion clinic and couldn’t get there.
Melissa: It also seems like very quickly after Roe there was a desire to claim that victory, and to not push further. You mention the incoming NARAL executive director in 1975 being told “the job would be a cinch,” that “it didn’t seem like it would have too much left to do.”
Amy: What could possibly happen next? (laughs)
NARAL started out as an effort to repeal anti-abortion laws in the states. There was this initial sense that the job should be a cinch now because we have Roe v. Wade and that the fight was over. I think that sense faded very quickly because of the Hyde Amendment.
I do think that there was immediately this sort of complacency. But I think pretty quickly after that it became clear, “Oh, Roe v. Wade is under attack, and the opposition is better organized.”
Melissa: You also write that at that time, some people regarded issues of abortion funding as obscure or complicated, compared to whether abortion was legal. It looked like they were then choosing to shift focus toward threats they assumed more people would care about, like a national ban. Do you think some people benefited from that simpler story?
Amy: One of the most fascinating interviews I did for the book was with a man named Roger Craver—I call him the father of the nonprofit industrial complex. He’s the guy who helped nonprofits figure out how to raise money from small donors. His equivalent on the right, who he managed to have a friendly relationship with, was Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail mastermind of the conservative movement. The two of them were doing same thing. Fifty-odd years ago—that was like the hot new controversial technology. What I really took away from Craver is that you do need a pretty simple, straightforward, but compelling story that has a very clear enemy. And when the devil is winning—in his terms—and you can point to something like the threat of a nationwide constitutional ban on abortion that’s looming, then you generate a sense of urgency that will lead people to sit down at their kitchen table after a long day of work and write a check.
Another thing that I learned from him is that people’s attention spans are pretty limited. We think of this as being a function of our era, but it was maybe always the case: that the story needed to be changing. You couldn’t just be like, “Poor people lost their right to access an abortion when the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976, and now, they still don’t have it.” You had to constantly convince people that there was this urgency.
I hadn’t really understood the degree to which the story that is written by nonprofits when they are trying to raise money determines the way that their donors—who are their most supportive base, the people who are writing checks to NARAL and Planned Parenthood—those folks learn the story of what’s important in part through these mailings, through the stories told to them by the folks who are trying to get them to donate.
So there is this simplification of the story, and this way in which incremental, more subtle changes, and the changes that affect low-income people, Black people, people who are not the donor class, get obscured as part of that process.
Melissa: Do you think that that dynamic is still with us—the competing demands, the fact that you need to reach people with a simple story? And are we repeating a story that didn’t work?
Amy: My fear around storytelling, and one of the themes of the book, is: Why aren’t stories enough? Why aren’t the stories of women like Rosie Jimenez and Becky Bell and Portia Ngumezi, who have died from abortion bans in their respective eras, from the ’70s to the ’80s to today, why are their deaths not enough? Why is it not enough when we know that a 4-year-old girl in McAllen, Texas, lost her mom, Rosie Jimenez, to the Hyde Amendment? Why is it not enough that we know that Porsha Ngumezi’s son chases after women who look like her on the street, shouting out to Mommy, because she died when she didn’t get care in time for a miscarriage in Texas? Why, why are those stories not enough to change the outcome of our elections?
Part of what I’ve been grappling with in our current moment is that I don’t think stories are enough if you haven’t built the organizing infrastructure that it takes to change the political landscape, to repeal these policies, to mobilize the very real outrage and sadness that many people feel when they hear those stories into a channel that will actually create political change. That requires massive amounts of grassroots organizing and mobilization. It doesn’t just require a text message being sent to your phone with someone’s story and then you make a donation and then it’s over.
One of the enduring legacies of the Hyde Amendment that I really wanted to highlight in the book is that it directed a lot of the energy of the most radical, intersectionally minded activists in the abortion rights space into mutual aid work. Because it took an enormous amount of energy to raise the tens of millions of dollars, in recent years, that it takes to actually pay for people’s abortions, and to pay for the practical support they need in order to get that care.
Meanwhile, I think the organizations that were more geared toward political organizing—chiefly, Planned Parenthood was very focused on providing health care. It’s a health care safety net provider. But I think we can see in retrospect that having an organization that is reliant on federal funding to provide those non-abortion health care services that are lifesaving to millions, and so they couldn’t risk losing them, having that organization steer the political direction of the movement was a mistake. There was a reliance on the courts to protect a right that had been given through the courts. The larger white-led groups within the abortion rights space had trusted, for almost 50 years, that the Supreme Court was going to protect the legal right it had bestowed in 1973. And I think there was an inability to absorb the possibility that that backstop was finally going to fail.
Melissa: It makes me think of something you mentioned early on in the book, the millions of dollars that are fundraised for people’s abortions—what if the folks doing that work had been able to do something different, and what if those resources had been able to be marshaled in a different way?
Amy: Exactly. What if they’d been running for city council? Or whatever!
There’s such a tremendous amount of energy that went into getting people the abortions they needed—from the people who worked in clinics, from people who worked in fundraising, people whose work is basically invisible. And when they succeed, what happens is the crisis is ameliorated somewhat. There are fewer people being forced to carry pregnancies to term, even now in the post-Dobbs moment, precisely because we have these brave clinicians operating under shield laws and mailing medication abortion to states like Texas, because we have abortion funds that are still raising millions of dollars to help people who still need to travel.
I think it also makes it harder to do what Roger Craver and his contemporaries were trying to do, which is to tell people, “There’s an emergency, the devil’s winning, we have to get out there,” because the number of abortions is up, because a lot of the energy of the movement has been directed into providing the abortions and paying for the abortions.
Melissa: There are so many characters in the book—like Craver, like Viguerie—that aren’t the bold-faced names that people have heard of. What drew you to these particular players?
Amy: I loved finding these people, precisely because I had never heard of them even though I’ve been reporting on abortion for many years. I want to believe in a version of history where crucial events are driven by folks who are not famous, who are behind the scenes. Their motives were really different from the motives that were on the minds of the presidents and the political figures. These were folks who were the keepers of the flame, right? They truly believed that they were doing God’s work. Some of them believed God was speaking to them directly. They believed that they were going to earn their place in heaven for the work that they were doing chipping away at abortion access. That taught me a lot about the relationship between the true believers that power social movements and that come up with long-shot ideas, and how they drive our politics in ways that are less visible. It’s only through dogged organizing that long-shot ideas become thinkable, right? And we can see that on the right and the left.
That’s why one of my favorite stories is the story of All* Above All, the initially long-shot campaign to repeal the Hyde Amendment and how it changed the way that we talk about that policy today, and made this unthinkable idea that we would ever try to repeal this policy that by then was so taken for granted, even by Democrats. They forced a lot of Democrats to change the way that they talked about that policy. They didn’t repeal it, because those changes don’t happen overnight. But they did have some incremental wins at the state and local level.
I hope people take away from this an understanding of how the smaller players, the true believers, the behind-the-scenes figures played a role in the death of Roe v. Wade; that it wasn’t just Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society working with the Alliance Defending Freedom to bring the perfect case to the perfect Supreme Court justices; that it was much more incremental than that, that a lot of the fight was in state legislatures and city councils and at the local level. And I think a big part of how the anti-abortion movement won was by building power in the states that progressives did not have.
