Around this time two years ago, political pundits were predicting an electoral blood bath. The 2022 midterms were supposed to prove ruinous for Democrats. Instead, they won a historic set of races — flipping state legislatures, gaining a Senate seat and minimizing losses in the House.
The contests refuted the longstanding assumption that abortion is not an issue that wins elections for Democrats. The backlash to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, stripping American women of their constitutional right to the procedure — turned abortion access into a powerful political motivating force.
Now, with the presidential election approaching, the two leading candidates have staked out starkly different positions on the issue.
Kamala Harris, a longtime advocate of reproductive rights, has made abortion access a cornerstone of her campaign — promising, if elected, to sign federal legislation restoring the protections of Roe v. Wade (a pledge that would be hard to fulfill in a divided government) and speaking frequently on the campaign trail about the effects of abortion restrictions on women and families. Donald Trump, who calls himself “proudly the person responsible” for ending Roe, supports allowing states to enact abortion restrictions, although he has said he would not sign a federal ban.
Harris has put Trump on his heels on this issue. His running mate, JD Vance, acknowledged in a recent debate that the American people “just don’t trust” Republicans on abortion, which the polls bear out: Harris has a double-digit lead on the issue, and a growing share of voters have ranked it as crucial to their decision about how to vote.
Abortion has been around for millenniums, and it’s been a live force in American politics for decades. But this November, it could prove decisive. How did we get here? The six books below help explain.
The Fall of Roe
By Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer
Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, both New York Times journalists, have produced the best and most current primer on the political forces that have shaped the public debate over abortion in the United States. Their ticktock of the decade that culminated in Dobbs reads like a thriller, grappling with both Democrats’ unearned belief in the imperishability of Roe and the dedication of a Republican coalition willing to play the long game to demolish it.
“Roe did not just fall once,” Dias and Lerer write. It fell with each successive limit placed on the procedure, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the 2020 election, and when states like Texas and Mississippi made it so hard for clinics to operate that patients traveled out of state for health care instead. “Nationally,” Dias and Lerer continue, “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.”
That view remains the minority: 63 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. But even if Harris prevails in November, the anti-abortion movement is built to last; with Republican-led state legislatures and the Supreme Court on its side, its decades-long work will not be easily reversed.
The Family Roe
By Joshua Prager
Roe has become such a shorthand for abortion rights that one could be forgiven for forgetting that the word refers not to a hot-button social issue but to an actual woman: Norma McCorvey, a.k.a. Jane Roe, who sued Henry Wade, the district attorney of Dallas County, Texas, over a state law that banned abortion unless the life of the mother was in imminent danger.
Joshua Prager grew interested in her after realizing that McCorvey, who was responsible for five decades of jurisprudence granting American women a constitutional right to an abortion, was never able to access the procedure herself. Her third daughter, whom she had while Roe was litigated, was given up for adoption, just as her second had been. (Her mother raised her eldest.) Prager spins his narrative out from there, with a determined focus on the real, flawed people who populate this most American tale.
McCorvey was never a perfect poster child for the reproductive rights movement. She drank and did drugs. She had a penchant for embellishing stories in public and private. Years after Roe, she disavowed abortion, but later she told The Daily News of New York: “I’m not pro-choice, I’m not pro-life: I’m pro-Norma.” Other books give us the sobering facts and mounting stakes: “The Family Roe” is a reminder that reproduction is, at its core, an elemental human drama.
The Turnaway Study
By Diana Greene Foster
Although it summarizes the findings of a research project, “The Turnaway Study” is no dour textbook. It is a riveting account of a real-world experiment in which Diana Greene Foster and a team of scientists spent a decade tracking around 1,000 women whom they found in the waiting rooms of 30 abortion clinics across 21 states.
Some of those women had abortions. Others were denied the procedure because their pregnancies had developed past the gestational limits set by their state or the facility — a situation more and more women find themselves in today. Abortion opponents often claim (without evidence) that the procedure is physically and mentally risky, and that women who have one regret it. Foster set out to determine whether those presumptions were true.
Her findings won’t shock those who have been following this debate: 95 percent of the women who received abortions felt no regret over their decision. But then, neither did most of the women who hadn’t been able to access the procedure — although they did bear other consequences, including higher rates of poverty, hypertension and chronic pelvic pain.
I was struck by the observation of one participant named Amy, who told researchers that she thought about the pregnancy she’d terminated only when she was contacted for the study. “I just knew that it was something that had to be done,” she said. “So we just kept living.”
Defenders of the Unborn
By Daniel K. Williams
The coalitions on either side of the battle over abortion access are well defined in 2024, with the Democratic Party firmly pro- and Republicans largely against. But that wasn’t always the case. In this history of the anti-abortion movement, Daniel K. Williams shows how, for much of the 20th century, many of those at the forefront of the movement to limit abortion access were New Deal Democrats, while Republicans — including many conservatives — largely supported legalization.
In revisiting the intellectual and political basis for the “pro-life movement,” Williams also rejects the notion that anti-abortion forces mobilized just in response to Roe v. Wade and the sexual revolution. Instead, he roots their convictions in religious doctrine, personal values and — a bitter pill for today’s progressives — civil rights: Many liberals in the 1950s and ’60s feared that abortion, if legalized, could be exploited as a tool for population control by racist legislators.
Read “Defenders of the Unborn” as a corrective to conventional wisdom. And to be humbled in the face of the historical record: People — and parties — can change.
This Common Secret
By Susan Wicklund with Alan Kesselheim
At least 11 people have been killed in attacks on abortion clinics in the United States since 1993. No wonder Susan Wicklund, a doctor, carried a .38-caliber revolver with her as she went about her work, traveling hundreds of miles a day to offer abortions at clinics across her native Wisconsin.
“This Common Secret” makes no stab at balance: It’s the memoir of a woman who has devoted her life to reproductive health care, sometimes at great personal cost. But it’s less fiery polemic than road diary, recounting intimate encounters with women who needed her and reflecting on those she couldn’t reach. At one point, Wicklund remembers driving to her grandmother’s house to tell her what she does for a living; an interview with her is about to air on “60 Minutes,” and Wicklund wants to break the news before CBS does. She’s worried her grandmother will disapprove, but her grandmother surprises her.
Her best friend got pregnant at 16, Wicklund’s grandmother tells her, most likely after being raped by her father. They attempted an at-home abortion. Her friend bled to death. “That was 72 years ago,” Wicklund’s grandmother tells her. “You are the first person I have ever told that story.”
The Girls Who Went Away
By Ann Fessler
In 2021, as the Supreme Court weighed a Mississippi abortion ban, Justice Amy Coney Barrett kept coming back to a question: Why was abortion necessary when women who didn’t want children could just give up their infants for adoption?
In invoking this question, Barrett was in fact recalling an earlier era. Between the end of World War II in 1945 and the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, some 1.5 million babies were given up for adoption in the United States. Shifting social attitudes had empowered a growing number of women to date and have sex, but that quasi liberation had not made the world friendlier to unmarried pregnant women, particularly teenagers.
Ann Fessler’s book is a collection of searing portraits of these girls, whose parents sent them to homes to wait out their pregnancies and relinquish their children. “I am shocked at how much it has impacted my life,” one of the women tells Fessler. “I really tried to move on and forget, I tried to do what they said, but it didn’t work.”
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