Who Killed Roe v. Wade?

Now that we have lived with the new reality of Dobbs for almost four years, its devastating impact is becoming clearer every day. At least seven women have died, and thousands have been forced to give birth against their will despite being victims of rape, incest, and domestic violence. When the Supreme Court issued its decision on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June of 2022, it ended a half century of American women having the basic and fundamental right to control their reproductive lives. The result has been a civil and human rights nightmare. Today, 43 percent of childbearing-age women live in states with major abortion restrictions. As a result, women’s bodies and medical options are governed by laws different than those that govern men’s. 

Getting to the bottom of why American women lost the fundamental protections of Roe is Amy Littlefield’s mission in her important and suspenseful new book, Killers of Roe. Littlefield, who has spent her journalism career on the abortion rights beat for The Nation and other publications, approaches her topic as a detective uncovering a murder mystery. She not only identifies the culprits of the crime, but also searches for clues to reveal their motives.  

Littlefield doesn’t shy from admitting that her search is personal. She is a Massachusetts liberal, and a social anthropologist of sorts, with a need to understand the community of grassroots anti-abortion activists who are as foreign to her as an isolated Amazonian tribe. Not surprisingly, she finds that this tribe is made up mostly of white, male, religious extremists whose Catholic or Christian evangelical faith gives them the staunch conviction that abortion is cold-blooded murder. At its core, Littlefield’s journey reminds us that knowledge is power. As one veteran of the reproductive rights wars, Frances Kissling, tells her, “If you don’t understand them, you can’t beat them.”  

For anyone who is enraged (like me) over the loss of Roe and who assumed (like me) that the primary people to blame are our current president and Senator Mitch McConnell for placing three anti-abortion justices on the Supreme Court, this book is required reading. Littlefield sets the record straight. The movement to end abortion rights has been a long time coming and has many godfathers. Conservative activists and politicians waged a decades-long campaign, first attacking the connection between reproductive rights and social welfare, then politically outmaneuvering the divided pro-choice movement, and finally moving against Roe itself. “The death of Roe,” Littlefield writes, “was death by a thousand stab wounds, some of them shallow and haphazard, some piercing and fatal. These blows were administered whenever any of the suspects could find an opportunity.”  

Informed and galvanized by her work years ago as an abortion clinic volunteer, Littlefield knows what it’s like to be on the front lines of what she calls a “holy war.” An intrepid reporter, she takes the reader from retirement communities in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Oregon to a church in Amarillo, Texas, and a sidewalk café on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, all in her nationwide search to find the culprits. Many of Littlefield’s suspects, like Paul Haring, Bob Bauman, Richard Viguerie, James Buckley, Randall Terry, and Mark Lee Dickson, are now obscure names, largely lost to history.   

Littlefield identifies the 1976 Hyde Amendment, which banned Medicaid funding for abortions, as the anti-abortion movement’s first victory. Ever since Illinois Republican Congressman Henry Hyde passed his eponymous bill, only three years after Roe, the pro-choice movement has been playing defense. Fifty years later, the bill is still holding strong. Littlefield highlights its foundational character:

The Hyde amendment … was the key to decrypting the motives of the killers of Roe. [It] encapsulated ‘in a nutshell’ two threads of the wider conservative agenda of which the anti-abortion movement would become an integral part. Those two threads were attacking welfare and attacking feminism…

The amendment has proven so successful that it caused more than a million forced births by 2010, according to one study Littlefield cites.   

Because the Hyde Amendment restricted abortion access for the most vulnerable—poor women—it had a double impact. “Conservatives have managed to impose a twisted paradox on the American people: They have made it unaffordable to get an abortion while simultaneously making it unaffordable to have a kid,” Littlefield writes. 

Though the Hyde Amendment itself is well known, Littlefield adds new details to the record about its true architect, who was not Hyde himself but a Catholic Republican Congressman, Bob Bauman. Bauman, whose political career ended in 1980 when he was arrested for soliciting sex from a 16-year-old male prostitute, knew that Hyde, a boisterous, politically popular figure, would have a better chance of passing the amendment.  

Littlefield does what few journalists and activists (if any) do in the red-hot center of this great culture war: She invites a real dialogue while being honest with her interview subjects about which side she is on. Often these conversations are confrontational and uncomfortable, but Littlefield usually manages to gain enough trust with her subjects for them to open up. She found Bauman, age 86, living in Wilton Manors, Florida, and asked him straight up: “I wonder if you can pinpoint a moment where you came to your beliefs around abortion?” It turns out that Bauman was adopted and never knew his birthmother. He explained that he struggled subconsciously with the possibility that his mother could have aborted him. Littlefield pressed Bauman about the death of Rosie Jimenez, the first woman known to have died as a result of the Hyde Amendment, following a botched back-alley abortion in Texas in 1977. She was a single mother with a four-year-old child. “The other side is just as bad,” Bauman responded. “The suffering that abortion causes is immeasurable … I don’t think that we have to spend federal money to support death.” (Death of the fetus, that is, not its mother.) 

“How do you feel about the lasting impact of this measure that you played such a big role in?” asked Littlefield. 

“Well, if I get any credit when I get to Saint Peter at the gate, I hope that’s on my list,” Bauman responded. “I think it’s the most important thing I ever did in Congress was to get the Hyde Amendment through under Henry’s name.” Littlefield heard this refrain from several “right-to-life” activists she talked to: Going to heaven is their goal, and stopping abortion is their ticket to the pearly gates.  

Littlefield also dissects the mistakes the pro-choice movement made. Her first stop is Mexico City, where she visits second-wave feminist Frances Kissling, the former president of Catholics for Choice. Kissling ran New York’s first abortion clinic after the state legalized the procedure in 1970, but she has since been criticized by younger feminists, including Littlefield, for being too politically moderate. Littlefield and Kissling argue over whether there should be limits on third-term abortions—Littlefield says no, Kissling says yes. “If I’m being asked, why do I think the movement has failed? I think it has failed because it has only one message,” Kissling told Littlefield. (That message: no limits whatsoever on abortion.) Kissling thinks the pro-choice movement was too extreme; Littlefield thinks it was too moderate because it took the politically expedient (or practical) strategy of abandoning funding for poor women after the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment in 1980.  

Littlefield also went to New York City, where she met Faye Wattleton, Planned Parenthood’s first Black female president. A glamorous, media-savvy activist who took the reins of the stodgy, politically neutral organization in 1978, Wattleton continued the fight to overturn the Hyde Amendment. But the political landscape had shifted: Instead of seeking to reinstate abortion funding for poor women, Wattleton fought to protect the basic constitutional right by opposing the newly introduced Human Life Amendment to the Constitution. Littlefield explains that Wattleton “was fighting not just a hostile federal government but her own board members and donors—for whom restoring Medicaid funding wasn’t necessarily a priority.”  

The next stop on Littlefield’s reproductive rights odyssey was the heart of Washington, D.C.’s conservative vortex: the office of direct-mail wizard Richard Viguerie. Her description of the experience reads like Dorothy meeting a right-wing Oz. “Richard Viguerie had nursed the American Right like a snarling little devil baby for sixty years,” she writes. Littlefield asks him, “What about abortion, is that an issue that was opportunistic—you saw it could move people?” 

“Absolutely,” he said. “The abortion issue is the door through which many people come into conservative politics, but they don’t stop there. Their convictions against abortion are like the first in a series of falling dominoes.”  

With the help of the newly organized evangelical vote, Ronald Reagan became America’s first actively anti-abortion president, and during his two terms in office he solidified the Republican Party’s alliance with the anti-abortion movement. Indeed, before Reagan’s presidency and the emergence of the evangelical voting bloc, Democrats were more likely than Republicans to be anti-abortion because many Democrats represented heavily Catholic urban districts. For example, when Congress voted on the anti-abortion constitutional amendment in 1983, one-third of Senate Republicans voted against it. That was the last congressional vote in which a significant number of Republicans voted for choice.  

Littlefield analyzes this new political alignment:  

This singling out of protection from abortion as the right that mattered above all else would allow Reagan to enact the first grand contradiction of the alliance between the Republican Party and the anti-abortion movement: He opposed abortion while gutting the public programs that allowed people to afford families … He would claim he was making government smaller while extending the government’s reach over bodily autonomy. 

By the early ‘90s, the anti-abortion movement had co-opted the rhetoric of the 1960s civil rights movement. Littlefield writes that under the direction of Randall Terry’s Operation Rescue, Wichita, Kansas—where demonstrators organized sit-ins outside abortion clinics in July and August of 1991—was “the Selma, Alabama, of the civil rights movement for fetuses.” Littlefield considers the founding of Operation Rescue the “moment when mostly white demonstrators co-opted the civil disobedience tactics used to tear down segregation, reverse engineering them to attack women’s rights.” These hypocritical fanatics would soon turn their righteous cause into a bloodbath by murdering eleven doctors and abortion clinic workers over the decades that followed.  

Littlefield found Randall Terry in Washington, D.C., where he was running a long-shot campaign for president as the Constitution Party’s candidate in the 2024 primaries. Though he is now a political outcast, Terry is still a true believer. “I wanted to interview Terry not only to understand his motivations—hatred of women, love of God, promotion of self, or all three—but because he was the unapologetic face of the conservative co-optation of the civil rights movement,” Littlefield writes. To be sure, this new “civil rights” movement defended only the rights of the unborn, not the living.  

Littlefield discovers that, like Bob Bauman, Randall Terry was an unwanted child: “‘My mom didn’t want me,’ Terry said [to] me seemingly out of the blue during our interview. ‘I was an unplanned pregnancy. She was 19 years old when she got pregnant in 1958.’” Terry also told Littlefield that, like Bauman, he hoped that saving the lives of the unborn would buy his ticket to heaven:

I live with the daily notion in front of me, that one day I will stand before my maker, and I want to hear him say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’ … I’d love him to reach out his hand and go: ‘Randy. I’m proud of you. You’re a good boy. You did it!’ … That’s my dream come true. 

The abortion rights battle shifted to the states after the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the spout for dark money to flood election coffers. Corporate money helped elect Republicans to state legislatures, which gerrymandered themselves into super-majorities. Dismantling campaign finance reform was something the National Right to Life Committee had lobbied for and benefited from. Even though polls in every state showed that a majority of the public favored reproductive rights, new Republican super majorities began to pass more laws limiting abortion. In 2011 alone, Republican statehouses passed 92 new abortion restrictions. In Texas, the passage of Senate Bill 8 in May 2021 banned abortion after six weeks, or when a heartbeat could be detected, essentially rendering abortion illegal. Trump’s new Supreme Court majority upheld the bill in September 2021, and, in June 2022, delivered the fatal blow to Roe. 

Fast forward to election night 2024, which Littlefield spent in a church in Amarillo, Texas, with Mark Lee Dickson, “the Johnny Appleseed of the anti-abortion movement, [and] a 39-year-old virgin.” Dickson’s brainchild, the “Sanctuary City for the Unborn,” a series of local ordinances that prohibit abortion in mostly Texas municipalities, paved the way for Senate Bill 8. But Dickson was swimming against the tide of women who insisted on taking control of their lives and bodies. The year before, more than 35,000 Texan women fled the state to get abortions, and thousands obtained prescription abortion medication in the mail.   

Just one week before the election, the first deaths that could be attributed to S.B. 8 were reported by ProPublica’s investigative team (who would later win the Pulitzer for their series). Josseli Barnica, a 28-year-old mother of a toddler, miscarried at 17 weeks in 2021. She died of sepsis after doctors at a Houston hospital refused to give her the medical care she needed because they could still detect a fetal heartbeat. Barnica’s life was sacrificed for that of an unviable 17-week-old fetus. Littlefield confronted Dickson with Barnica’s story. “When you read the stories about these women, even if doctors made a mistake in the moment and interpreted the law too conservatively, obviously the law was a factor. I mean, does that weigh on you?” 

“These people are misinterpreting the law and the problem is with them,” Dickson responded. “Abortion is an elective procedure. It is in the same category as breast implants.” Maddeningly, no facts or reasoning that Littlefield presented to Dickson, or any of the other true believers she interviewed, would change their view that the life of a fetus had more value than the life of its mother. 

Littlefield’s quest to “understand your opponent” helps solve the mystery of who killed Roe. It also lets readers know there is hope for justice. A newly energized and focused reproductive rights movement has scored several political victories since Dobbs, and telehealth doctors have treated thousands of women in states with abortion bans using the medication Mifepristone. While the spiritual civil war over abortion rights rages, Littlefield provides us with a roadmap of how we got here, and points readers in the direction of where we need to go.