The Fall of Roe: You Thought Dobbs Was Bad? They’re Coming for Brown v. Board
In June 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned more than a half-century of Supreme Court precedent. Five justices voted to deny constitutional protection for a woman’s right to choose and gutted privacy as a fundamental right. Texas and 13 other states now bar abortions in almost all circumstances. Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina have enacted six-week bans.
Writing for the Supreme Court majority, Samuel Alito, a George W Bush appointee, explicitly compared the death of Roe to the end of state-enforced racial segregation, 68 years before. Back in 1954, in a landmark ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, a unanimous court overruled the doctrine of “separate but equal.” These days, Brown is under attack from Alito’s allies on and off the bench.
In their new book The Fall of Roe, named for Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that previously safeguarded federal abortion rights, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lehrer masterfully lay out how the cultural right and pro-life movement refused to take “no” for an answer, played the long game, and attained the victory for which they had yearned. Dias and Lerer also capture the somnolence of the left and how “intersectionality” came to divide old allies.