One of the first major decisions of the Supreme Court under John Roberts’s tenure as Chief Justice came in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart, a landmark case that upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003. But Roberts had been on the (undisclosed) record as critical of Roe v. Wade since at least 1981. That year, when he was working as an advisor to the attorney general and shaping legal policy at the very top of the Justice Department, he wrote favorably that the leading voices on the Right “recognized a serious problem in the current exercise of judicial power,” which he said was illustrated “by what is broadly perceived to be the unprincipled jurisprudence of Roe v. Wade.”

Yet in 2005, when John Roberts took the oath to testify truthfully in the Senate hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court, he had to get around the fact that the majority of the American people, and probably the majority of senators, supported Roe. To overcome this problem, Roberts offered obfuscating testimony. Despite his oath to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” at his confirmation hearing, it was not until 2022 that Roberts chose to fully reveal his views on Roe, when he joined the majority of justices in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in upholding Mississippi’s fifteen-week abortion ban, in direct contravention of Roe.

One persistent piece of spin by Roberts was to claim that the anti-abortion briefs he signed on to or supervised when he was the political deputy in the Solicitor General’s Office of the George H.W. Bush administration were just “the positions of the administration” and thus did not reflect his own views. (Bush himself had supported family planning and Planned Parenthood earlier in his public career but made the expedient transition to pro-life positions when he joined the Reagan ticket in 1980). Such positions included supporting a state law requiring women to notify their husbands before they could obtain an abortion and defending a gag rule barring family planning clinics that received federal money from discussing abortion. These sorts of maneuvers came to characterize how Roberts and other extremist judicial candidates who opposed abortion rights would disguise their unpopular views, both as they surfaced in their past records as well as in their testimony under oath before Congress.

Roberts also omitted Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic from a list of his most significant cases that he provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee. In that litigation, Roberts took the same side as antiabortion extremists against a women’s health center that had sued under federal civil rights laws to stop those extremists from blockading abortion clinics. The petitioners included Randall Terry, who relaunched “Operation Rescue” in 1986 (after it was initially launched in 1970 by the radical Catholic antiabortion activist L. Brent Bozell Jr., William F. Buckley Jr.’s brother-in-law). Its slogan was “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder.” Other petitioners were Michael and Jayne Bray. Michael Bray was a member of a violent domestic terrorist group called the Army of God, which called for a biblically based government in America. He had been convicted a few years earlier, in 1985, of bombing abortion clinics and women’s health advocacy centers.

After serving a four-year sentence, Bray returned to civilian life and to protesting abortion clinics in the Washington, DC, area. The Brays and Terry were represented by Jay Sekulow, who later helped launch the Judicial Crisis Network, which helped get John Roberts and Samuel Alito confirmed to the Supreme Court. (Sekulow also later represented Donald Trump in his first impeachment trial.) On the other side of the Bray case was the National Abortion Federation, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the American Civil Liberties Union, and more than two dozen other groups committed to women’s health and equality.

Roberts sought to distance himself from the violent extremists on his side of the case by suggesting they could be charged instead with trespassing, while he argued that the people Terry and the Brays were targeting at clinics did not deserve federal civil rights protections. As principal deputy solicitor general for the United States, John Roberts argued that antiabortion protesters who obstructed access to clinics had not violated federal civil rights laws that banned conspiracies to deprive other groups of their rights. Roberts specifically argued that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 should be construed to apply only to discrimination based on race, not gender, even though the Congress that adopted that statute stated that it expected the protections of the act to extend to “all the thirty-eight millions of the citizens of this nation.” The statute did not limit its protections to Blacks but applied to any “class of persons” deprived of their rights.

Roberts also argued that federal civil rights law should not apply because the blockaders were also obstructing men accompanying women, too, and not just women. That is like saying the Black civil rights activists in the South could not be protected from conspiracies to deprive them of their rights because some whites joined them in the cause.

But the Supreme Court adopted Roberts’s approach and gave antiabortion groups a major victory. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, asserting, “the characteristic that formed the basis of the targeting here was not womanhood, but the seeking of abortion.”

Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry Blackmun dissented, noting, “Congress enacted legislation imposing on the Federal Judiciary the responsibility to remedy both abuses of power by persons acting under color of state law and lawless conduct that state courts are neither fully competent, nor always certain, to prevent. “The Klu Klux Klan Act . . . was a response to the massive, organized lawlessness that infected our Southern States during the post–Civil War era.” The dissent noted that the lower courts agreed that the statute “provides a federal remedy for petitioners’ violent concerted activities on the public streets and private property of law-abiding citizens.” They also recognized the detailed factual findings of the lower courts that Operation Rescue’s swarming activities could cause women seeking an abortion or continuing an abortion procedure “serious physical and psychological injuries.” Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also dissented, crediting the reality of the “threats of mob violence” faced by patients and staff. The risk of violence was real. In 1994, the year after the Court’s ruling in favor of Roberts’s argument, Michael Bray wrote a book, A Time to Kill, arguing that people were justified in using “godly force” to murder abortion doctors.

As Justices Stevens and Blackmun wrote in a critique that really applied to both Scalia’s opinion and Roberts’s contentions, “It is unfortunate that the Court has analyzed this case as though it presented an abstract question of logical deduction rather than a question concerning the exercise and allocation of power in our federal system of government. The Court ignores the obvious (and entirely constitutional) congressional intent behind [that law] to protect this Nation’s citizens from what amounts to the theft of their constitutional rights by organized and violent mobs across the country.”

After the Supreme Court adopted John Roberts’s analysis, Congress sought to pass a new federal law to redress the harmful consequences. In 1994, after Dr. David Gunn was assassinated by an antiabortion extremist, Congress adopted the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act to make sure federal law protects against “the use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with or attempt to injure, intimidate or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion” and “intentional damage or destruction of a reproductive health care facility.” According to one study, in the fifteen years before FACE was adopted, there had been “at least 9 murders, 17 attempted murders, 406 death threats, 179 incidents of assault or battery, and 5 kidnappings committed against abortion providers [plus] 41 bombings, 175 arsons, 96 attempted bombings or arsons, 692 bomb threats, 1993 incidents of trespassing, 1400 incidents of vandalism,” and other extremely disruptive tactics deployed by antiabortion extremists.” The FACE Act, however, did not bar protesters from carrying signs or distributing literature.

That new federal law helped reduce the violence of antiabortionists at clinics, and other states adopted analogous laws. Massachusetts, for example, passed the Reproductive Health Care Facilities Act, which initially prevented interfering with driveways and entrances, after the Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that a Colorado law requiring consent to approach people within 100 feet of abortion facilities was constitutional. That ruling was in Hill v. Colorado, a 6–3 decision written by Justice Stevens. However, a few years after John Roberts became Chief Justice and Alito was confirmed, Roberts wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion in McCullen v. Coakley, which struck down the Massachusetts “buffer zone” law that barred people from occupying roads and sidewalks within thirty-five feet of a reproductive health care facility. Citing the First Amendment, Roberts allowed aggressive and obstructive “sidewalk counseling” by antiabortion activists urging women not to have abortions. That case did not present the question of whether to uphold Roe v. Wade, but it was one in a line of cases that chipped away at women’s health care rights, impeding their ability to freely exercise their rights under Roe.

After Donald Trump became president in 2017, a group called the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) launched a new strategy for overturning Roe. ADF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “hate group” for its attacks on gay rights, was launched in 1993 by a group of antiabortion/antigay televangelists and spearheaded by James Dobson (founder of the Family Research Council). By 2017, ADF’s budget from secretive sources was about $50 million. That summer, at a “summit” at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton resort overlooking the beach in Laguna Niguel, California, ADF lawyers and other right-wing operatives discussed pursuing a fifteen-week abortion ban. That marker was chosen as a way to challenge Roe’s constitutional protection of access to abortion prior to “viability”—the capacity of a fetus to survive outside the womb—which is generally marked at about twenty-three weeks of gestation. ADF then wrote the “model” bill that became the Mississippi law at issue in the Dobbs case. Mississippi was chosen not because abortions were especially common there but because its government was politically amenable to advancing such an overtly unconstitutional law.

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant signed the Gestational Age Act into law in March 2018. It provided no exception for rape or incest and specified a ten-year prison sentence for doctors who provide an abortion after fifteen weeks. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the only abortion provider in Mississippi, challenged the law as facially invalid under Roe. US District Court Judge Carlton Reeves granted summary judgment and issued a permanent injunction against the fifteen-week ban. The following year, in December 2019, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that decision in a 3–0 ruling, noting, “In an unbroken line dating to Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court’s abortion cases have established (and affirmed, and re-affirmed) a woman’s right to choose an abortion before viability. States may regulate abortion procedures prior to viability so long as they do not impose an undue burden on the woman’s right, but they may not ban abortions.

In March 2020, Lynn Fitch, the state’s new attorney general, sought review by the US Supreme Court. Fitch’s campaign had been funded in part by Neil Corkery, the person Leonard Leo trusts to keep the financial records of his core nonprofit arms; her election was also aided by the Republican Attorneys General Association, whose largest funders have been Leo-tied groups. Leo, for readers not yet acquainted with the money-moving duke of the antiabortion crusade, is described by Americans United for Separation of Church and State as the “political powerbroker at the center of a tangled web of conservative organizations, dark-money groups, and for-profit consulting firms” which seek to remake the law to suit his beliefs.

While the petition to hear the case was pending, on September 18, 2020, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Senator Mitch McConnell then orchestrated Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation, in a party-line vote, just seven days before Election Day on November 3rd, and that change in personnel gave Chief Justice John Roberts a new 6–3 Republican “super majority.”

It’s worth recalling that in March of 2016, following the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, McConnell refused to consider Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, on the manufactured grounds that he was “following the long-standing tradition of not fulfilling a nomination in the middle of a presidential year.” Of course there was no such tradition, and certainly not one that prevented the hypocritical McConnell from shoehorning Amy Coney Barrett onto the Court at the last possible minute before the 2020 election, after early voting across the country had begun and Americans were already voting Trump out of office. This legislative legerdemain provided Trump with three appointments to the Supreme Court in his first term —Neil Gorsuch, Bret Kavanaugh and Barrett—and the opportunity to cement a hard-right supermajority for years to come.

For seven months following Barrett’s confirmation, the Roberts Court held off on agreeing to consider Dobbs, adopting a strategic separation from Ginsburg’s passing before taking up the case. In May 2021, the Roberts Court allowed the case to move forward. Dozens of groups submitted amicus briefs on both sides, including several with ties to Leo—such as the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Becket Fund, Students for Life, and CatholicVote.org—all of which attacked Roe. The brief on behalf of the Family Research Council was submitted by the law firm of Consovoy McCarthy, where the administrative trustee of Leo’s billion-dollar trust fund is a partner. Also attacking Roe in an amicus brief to the Court was Trump’s January 6–tied lawyer John Eastman.

US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) also submitted an amicus brief, alongside Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT). They called Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey “unworkable”—invoking one of the prongs for the reversal of a precedent that John Roberts had emphasized during the Senate hearings on his nomination to the Court. They urged that those precedents protecting the constitutional right to access abortion be overturned. Leo and Corkery had also helped launch Josh Hawley’s political career when he ran for attorney general of Missouri over a decade before. Unbeknownst to the public, Senator Hawley’s wife, Erin Hawley, was helping to manage the Dobbs litigation for ADF, which had orchestrated the legislation and the ensuing court case. Her activities included helping Mississippi with its briefs and coordinating amicus briefs from so-called third parties. One reason why Erin’s work was kept from the public is that backers of the litigation found it useful to present the Mississippi law as written by a state legislator, Becky Currie, who previously worked as a nurse. After the case was won, however, right-wing media boasted that ADF’s “relative anonymity was not an oversight and instead was part of a deliberate strategy” to avoid public focus on its role. Notably, Hawley clerked for John Roberts, and she has deep ties to the Leo-backed antiabortion agenda.

The Court held oral arguments in the case on December 1, 2021, with Julie Rikelman from the Center for Reproductive Rights and US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar arguing that the Mississippi law violated the constitutional rights enshrined in Roe v. Wade. Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, who had clerked for Clarence Thomas in 2015–2016, urged the Court to reverse Roe as “egregiously wrong.” After the argument, Stewart, Fitch, and Hawley together addressed an exclusive group of ADF allies. Fitch reportedly said, “First of all, to God be the glory. . . . We all prayed, worked so hard for this day. It all came together because everyone here . . . we’re believers, and we knew this day would come. . . . God selected this case. He was ready. The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

Five months later, with no ruling on the case yet issued, The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page warned that John Roberts “may be trying to turn another Justice” to uphold the Mississippi law without outright reversing Roe. The Journal’’s tactic appeared to be bullying Roberts to solidify the willingness of Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett to expressly reverse Roe, despite the seeming assurances they gave in public and private around their confirmation hearings, during which they acknowledged that Roe was an important precedent that, implicitly, they would not reverse.

[In his testimony Kavanaugh used the terms “settled” and “precedent” and noted that Roe had been reaffirmed multiple times, despite his record of hostility toward abortion rights. Barrett, in a less precarious position because Kavanaugh’s fifth and deciding vote had already been secured, perhaps did not feel as constrained to tiptoe around the issue and therefore declined to classify Roe as a “super-precedent,” i.e. a Court decision beyond reach. But both nominees tried to suggest with their answers about Roe that they could be trusted to uphold the law. And both ultimately signed onto an opinion that expressly rejected its very legal foundation.]

Just a day or two after the Journal’s extraordinary warning, a copy of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs case was leaked to Politico. It was published in a piece bylined by Politico’s Supreme Court reporter Josh Gerstein and, curiously, a national security reporter named Alexander Ward. Although some on the right vociferously blamed Democratic appointees to the Court or their staff for the leak, it is not clear that they had even seen Alito’s draft at that point. The leak helped lock in Alito’s majority for outright reversal, which the Journal had been aiming for, because right-wing intelligentsia would see flip-flopping as discrediting. Roberts was apparently outraged by the leak and launched a one-of-a-kind investigation. That probe required nearly everyone working for the Court—except the justices themselves and their spouses—to answer questions under penalty of perjury. Ultimately, the investigation could not determine the source of the leak.

On June 24, 2024, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Dobbs in an official opinion that was substantially identical to the leaked draft. Five of the Republican justices—Alito, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch—struck down Roe and Casey and upheld Mississippi’s law. Roberts concurred in the result of allowing the pre-viability abortion ban to go into effect but said it was not necessary to overturn precedents explicitly to do so, even though the statute was plainly unconstitutional under those precedents, as the lower courts had found.

With Barrett confirmed to the Court in place of Ginsburg, Alito did not have to tolerate Roberts’s artifice of gradualism to get a fifth vote to destroy the protections for accessing abortion guaranteed by Roe and Casey. Alito’s ruling characterized Roe as an illegitimate expression of “liberty” by asserting that only “deeply rooted” rights could be recognized and access to abortion was not one of them. Alito went so far as to cite archaic pronouncements of men like Sir Matthew Hale, “a 17th-century [English] jurist who conceived the notion that husbands can’t be prosecuted for raping their wives, who sentenced women to death as ‘witches,’ and whose misogyny stood out even in his time.”¹¹ Hale sowed into English history the notion that juries should be skeptical of women’s claims of rape—even though the documented evidence over centuries shows that the real problem is not false accusations by women but false denials by the men who raped them. It is also repugnant for the US Supreme Court of the twenty-first century to suggest that the rights of American women should be informed by the views of a Puritan witch hunter born in 1609; yet Alito and his fellow Republicans had no compunction about citing such a monstrous man as Hale in a ruling by America’s highest court.

Alito also cited another man, who lived in medieval Europe, to claim that abortion had been a “crime” since the thirteenth century. He copied that claim from the brief of a close ally of Leonard Leo named Robbie George, who runs the Witherspoon Institute, an Opus Dei–linked outpost at Princeton. The Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association rebuked the Roberts Court for Alito’s assertions, noting, “The court’s majority opinion refers to ‘history’ 67 times, claiming that ‘an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.’ Our brief shows plentiful evidence, however, of the long legal tradition, extending from the common law to the mid-1800s (and far longer in some American states, including Mississippi), of tolerating termination of pregnancy before occurrence of ‘quickening,’ the time when a woman first felt fetal movement.”

Alito’s opinion—inlaid with bombastic, religiously inflected rhetoric—reads like a partisan editorial, tinged with language from the Salem trials. It’s almost as though the supremely arrogant editorial board of The Wall Street Journal were operating from within the nation’s most ornate courthouse. Unlike the Journal’s rants, however, Alito’s screed carries the force of law and is forcing Americans into crises that threaten their lives, their health, and their future ability to start a family if and when they choose.

In his concurring opinion, John Roberts voted to uphold Mississippi’s abortion ban after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, when a fetus is definitely not viable outside the womb, but he did not join Alito’s opinion striking down Roe and Casey outright. He also chose not to join the dissenters—Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—defending those legal precedents. Instead, Roberts wrote that he would have preferred to wait for a case that litigated an abortion ban from an earlier point in pregnancy, in order to consider overturning Roe entirely. Roberts apparently preferred to divest Roe of meaning, quietly extinguishing its protections, while leaving a neutered husk behind.

Roberts’s concurring opinion echoed the public claims made by Erin Hawley, his former two-time law clerk, who argued for dramatic effect, “We are only one of seven countries that allow abortion until viability and that puts us in the company of China and North Korea.” Roberts wrote, “Only a handful of countries, among them China and North Korea, permit elective abortions after twenty weeks; the rest have coalesced around a 12-week line.” Strikingly, Hawley and Roberts also home in on the exact same countries, China and North Korea, out of the seven possible examples to list, thereby implicitly drawing comparisons between the “communism” of these countries and those that allow their citizens to freely obtain abortions. However, even under Roe and Casey, the United States did not allow abortion under all circumstances; instead, the law limited state barriers to abortion in the first trimester and ensured any restrictions later in a pregnancy allowed reasonable exceptions for the mother’s health and life. Only two dozen countries in the world entirely ban abortions, and most of those are authoritarian states.

Roberts also sought to position his Dobbs opinion as consistent with his nomination testimony, portraying his preference for not overtly overruling Roe as an expression of restraint: “The Court’s decision to overrule Roe and Casey is a serious jolt to the legal system—regardless of how you view those cases. A narrower decision rejecting the misguided viability line would be markedly less unsettling, and nothing more is needed to decide this case” (emphasis added). A serious jolt? That is a good description of the public’s reaction to having their rights stripped away. Rather than demonstrating judicial “restraint,” Roberts’s Dobbs decision is indicative of his seemingly political calculation that erosion is the way to avoid a “serious jolt.”

The reality is that slowly dissolving a precedent is a strategy that provides fewer opportunities for jolting the public into action, for grassroots mobilization against the Court, like the metaphorical frog being slowly boiled in a pot. In reality, a frog will jump out when water gets uncomfortably warm, but unfortunately humans are apparently much more complacent in response to a rising threat than the typical amphibian.

Alito and Roberts seem to have the same destination on the horizon: a land where women’s rights are subordinate to a government more concerned about their breeding than their lives, their health, their families, or their dreams. But Roberts is more attentive to not provoking a political backlash that could ultimately thwart his larger agenda. Dobbs produced a “serious jolt” precisely because it led almost immediately to a destination a majority of Americans never wanted to see. Indeed, most Americans never thought the elimination of the constitutional right to abortion was actually possible until they woke up in 2022 and learned they had been profoundly mistaken.

I am tempted to recount the myriad ways in which Alito’s majority opinion was deeply flawed and exhibited an unconscionable level of cruelty and profound indifference to women and the people and communities who love them. Instead, I invite the reader to seek out the powerful dissenting opinion by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, which expertly does this work. A few lines from their dissent suffice:

“Now a new and bare majority of this Court—acting at practically the first moment possible—overrules Roe and Casey. It converts a series of dissenting opinions expressing antipathy toward Roe and Casey into a decision greenlighting even total abortion bans. . . . It eliminates a 50-year-old constitutional right that safeguards women’s freedom and equal station. It breaches a core rule-of-law principle, designed to promote constancy in the law. In doing all of that, it places in jeopardy other rights, from contraception to same-sex intimacy and marriage. And finally, it undermines the Court’s legitimacy. . . . With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent.”

As legally comprehensive as their dissenting opinion is, Marge Piercy’s words touch upon the inhumanity of banning abortion in a more visceral way, to me, in her poem “Right to life,” which I have cherished since I first encountered it in law school in 1992:

I will choose what enters me, what becomes

of my flesh. Without choice, no politics,

no ethics lives. I am not your cornfield,

not your uranium mine, not your calf

for fattening, not your cow for milking.

You may not use me as your factory.

Priests and legislators do not hold shares

in my womb or my mind.

This is my body. If I give it to you

I want it back. My life

is a non-negotiable demand.

Dobbs jolted the public awake, into a nightmare, facilitated by the Roberts Court and supported by an intense network of antiabortion activists. Overturning Roe v. Wade was a personal goal of Leonard Leo, and it was in the Federalist Society’s “DNA” from the very beginning. In 1982, the first Federalist Society event, held at Yale Law School, was about abortion. Since the Federalist Society’s launch, its members have influenced government policy on abortion in every Republican administration. Its defenders have even bragged that “symbolic of their influence, members of the Federalist Society have presented oral arguments to the Supreme Court in every significant abortion case since 1992.”

Although the Federalist Society claims not to take a position on issues, its members’ “ideas and tactics have shaped abortion law and jurisprudence since Roe, shining a light on the success that conservatives have had chipping away at the right to make abortion decisions.” As noted by scholars who have studied the group, “Within the Federalist Society, the home of efforts to limit or overturn the constitutional rights related to personal sexual autonomy is the Religious Liberties Practice Group [which contends] that state or federal laws advancing gay rights, and access to contraception and abortion, offend the religious liberty of those who disagree. Such laws amount, some claim, to ‘government-backed persecution.’”

But how could a society of law students and lawyers accomplish such a dramatic rewrite of our laws? During the thirty-plus years that Leo has helped to guide the Federalist Society, it has focused on the courts and judicial appointments because personnel is policy. After all, all six of the Republican appointees to the US Supreme Court were confirmed with the help of Leo.

So perhaps it should come as no surprise that Leonard Leo had prescheduled an exclusive and very luxurious party at his mansion in Maine in conjunction with a conference hosted by George Mason’s law school, just as the Dobbs ruling was about to be issued. As ProPublica described it:

The party guests who arrived on the evening of June 23, 2022, at the Tudor-style mansion on the coast of Maine were a special group in a special place enjoying a special time. The attendees included some two-dozen federal and state judges—a gathering that required US marshals with earpieces to stand watch while a Coast Guard boat idled in a nearby cove. Caterers served guests . . . Winston Churchill’s favorite Champagne. . . . the decades-long campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, which a leaked draft opinion had said was “egregiously wrong from the start,” could come to fruition within days, if not hours. Over dinner courses paired with wines . . . attendees jockeyed for a word with the man who had done as much as anyone to make this moment possible: their host, Leonard Leo.

The death blow that the Roberts Court dealt to Roe the next day unleashed chaos in the lives and destinies of women whose rights will be restricted for years to come—thanks to Leo and the backing of anti-choice billionaires.

What has happened since the Roberts Court overturned Roe v. Wade?

As Alito was doing his victory tour (including a speech in Rome underwritten by a clinic at Notre Dame Law School, which is one of a number of groups funded by Leo), Republican officials were using their new power to restrict abortion to impose an array of hardships, such as -A $10,000 bounty for suing a mother who helped her daughter get an abortion just a few weeks after missing her period—an abortion made illegal when done more than six weeks after conception, which is when most people first learn they are pregnant;

• Emergency room doctors, at the insistence of legal counsel, turning away terrified pregnant women in need of emergency medical care but apparently not close enough to death; and
• An attempt to force a ten-year-old girl to carry a pregnancy, the result of rape, to term and to give birth against her will.

Some states—like Georgia and Texas, captured by regressive political donors and with legislatures gerrymandered with the blessing of the Roberts Court and its open hostility to voting rights—stood ready to exploit the Court’s reversal of Roe by imposing six-week abortion bans that had recently been incorporated into so-called trigger laws. Other states, like Arizona and Wisconsin, had nineteenth-century restrictions that sprang into force. The Arizona Supreme Court, with all Republican appointees, issued a decree allowing its dormant 1864 abortion ban to go into effect, but the legislature passed a repeal, which Democratic Governor Katie Hobbs signed. The battle over Wisconsin’s 175-year-old ban is ongoing. In 2023, a billionaire named Dick Uihlein spent millions through front groups, like Fair Courts America, to try to install Dan Kelly, an antiabortion evangelical, on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in order to secure an antiabortion majority. He failed. Two years later, in 2025, Uihlein was back trying to capture another seat on that state court, but this time his state-court-capture agenda was buttressed with more than $20 million spent by Donald Trump’s biggest-known sponsor: billionaire Elon Musk. The judicial candidate favored by Musk and Uihlein lost. Notably, in both of those Wisconsin elections, an antiabortion group called Women Speak Out got most of its funding via one man: Uihlein.

Dobbs was just the sort of lightning strike, startling the public awake from dreamy reverence for the US Supreme Court, that Roberts desperately wanted to avoid. It brought home what Planned Parenthood and other public interest groups and advocates had been saying in elections since before John Roberts was appointed: that women’s reproductive rights were gravely at risk. Our rights could be rolled back by right-wing political operatives wearing judicial robes if we did not protect against the Right’s efforts to capture the Court. During the summer immediately following Dobbs, in deep-red Kansas, voters rejected a proposal to amend the state constitution to say there was no right to abortion. In the 2022 midterm election that was forecasted to be a “red wave,” Republicans did not capture the Senate. They barely won the House—and that was only because the Roberts Court had allowed election districts that favored Republicans to stand even though they violated the requirements of the Voting Rights Act.

As Republican-dominated states began enforcing their bans and other restrictions on abortion, countless women—often with their partners—came forward to attest publicly to how they had been harmed by those limits. Some of them compellingly testified about how they had nearly died as hospitals refused to treat miscarriages with procedures associated with abortion services. A Georgia woman, Amber Nicole Thurman, died after a hospital refused to administer lifesaving health care to treat her miscarriage, paralyzed into inaction by a state law mandating that doctors withhold treatment until a woman was near death. Her preventable death left behind a six-year-old son to grow up without his mother. Tragically, Amber’s family is not alone in losing a mother to the inhumane restrictions made possible by the Roberts Court.

Less than two months after the Dobbs ruling, antiabortion extremists formed a new front group in Amarillo, Texas, to ensure that the case they filed would be assigned to the one federal judge assigned to that district: Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. That front group, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM), was created in August 2022, just weeks after the Dobbs ruling. Even though it asserted that it had operations in Amarillo, its filing for tax-exempt status placed it in Bristol, Tennessee. In each of its first two years of operations, it had less than $50,000 in revenue and told the Internal Revenue Service it did not even have a website, but that did not stop it from bringing litigation to try to destroy the ability of American women to obtain medication abortions. AHM’s president is listed as Donna Harrison, a Michigander whose day job is with the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG), which was also listed as a plaintiff in the case. AAPLOG seeks to impose its religious agenda on the practice of medicine, and it is notorious for promoting discredited claims about abortion and birth control, including the widely debunked assertion that abortion leads to breast cancer.

Kacsmaryk is a go-to political operative installed in judicial chambers. Why? Before becoming a judge, he was the deputy general counsel at First Liberty, a nonprofit law firm launched in 1997 by antiabortion activist Kelly Shackelford, who is also a leader of Ziklag, a group trying to make US law conform to its view of the Bible. Kacsmaryk has claimed that LGBTQ rights and women’s reproductive rights stem from the “radical” and “libertine” sexual revolution, and he has aggressively supported a religious-based right to discriminate against gays and lesbians. After Trump nominated him, Kacsmaryk even hid from the American people an antiabortion article he had written that had not yet been published. As a judge, he has sought to bar access to emergency contraception and even birth control at pharmacies. (For an overview of the Kacsmaryk chicanery, and how he came to be appointed, see “Texas Judge Who Ruled on Mifepristone was Handpicked by the Same Network that Brought the Lawsuit,” by Anne Nelson in The Washington Spectator).

In response to AHM’s challenge to the approval of mifepristone by the Food and Drug Administration, Kacsmaryk eagerly issued an injunction to rescind the FDA’s approval of the abortion-inducing medication. Acting as if he were still a lawyer for the antiabortion group that paid his salary for years, Kacsmaryk claimed that the FDA’s approval process more than twenty years earlier had been flawed, basing his edict on biased, outlier studies asserting that mifepristone was dangerous. In reality, mifepristone has been proven safe by numerous studies in the United States and abroad; it is safer than many prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Since Dobbs, the most common form of abortion in the United States is through medicine and not surgery.

Kacsmaryk asserted that antiabortion doctors had standing to challenge the FDA’s drug-approval process using absurd reasoning: because of the possibility that they might someday have to help save a woman’s life by being forced to perform a surgical abortion, against their will, if mifepristone did not work. Republican appointees to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed that ruling. One of the judges on that court, Trump-appointee James Ho, even asserted that a doctor has a legal interest in ensuring a fetus is born, even if the patient does not want to continue the pregnancy. As Orwellian as it sounds, Ho suggested a doctor’s interest in seeing a pregnancy through to birth is stronger than a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy.

What did the Roberts Court do? True to Roberts’s general approach of not wanting to spook people into action with a “serious jolt” in an election year, replicating the disastrous political consequences of Dobbs in 2022, the Court took the case but didn’t issue a substantive ruling. Roberts received the headlines he surely preferred a few months before the 2024 presidential election: “Supreme Court Keeps Status Quo on Abortion Pill,” “Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Abortion Pill Mifepristone,” and “Supreme Court Preserves Access to Abortion Pill.” The headlines, for low-information voters, make John Roberts out to be the hero. He is not. The Roberts Court was just kicking the can down the road until after the 2024 election. The Supreme Court sent that case back to the lower court on “standing” grounds, ruling on facts that were plain from the outset of the suit that the doctors’ group did not sustain any legally cognizable injury from pregnant Americans having access to mifepristone—despite the outrageous machinations of Kacsmaryk and Ho to concoct such grounds. However, the Roberts Court did so with the knowledge that Kacsmaryk had already allowed Republican-led states to join the litigation. The Trump administration later moved to dismiss the case and began to consider revoking FDA approval.

The Roberts Court also took unusual actions in 2024 beyond how it handled the lawsuit seeking to deauthorize abortion medication. In Moyle v. United States, the Court took a case away from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which was examining whether Idaho could block the enforcement of federal rules to protect the health of patients seeking emergency abortion care. Following Dobbs, the Joe Biden administration made clear that it interpreted a Reagan-era law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), as applying to abortion care. EMTALA requires hospitals that receive Medicaid reimbursement to protect the health of people seeking emergency treatment. Idaho objected to EMTALA’s protections under its post-Dobbs law that makes it a state crime for a doctor to give abortion care to a woman who is not on the brink of death (or unless, for example, parents certify that their minor daughter became pregnant through rape). The Idaho attorney general hired the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Erin Hawley, who as mentioned had earlier clerked for Roberts, to litigate the case.

During the 2024 election year, after improvidently intervening in Moyle v. United States and hearing oral arguments, the Roberts Court abruptly changed course, deciding to send the case back to the Ninth Circuit and await a decision on the merits, which is the normal sequence for appeals. Following Trump’s inauguration, the federal government dropped its defense of EMTALA, making the case moot. That decision “places pregnant patients seeking emergency medical care in the state at risk of grave harms, including deaths” in states that ban abortion, as Physicians for Human Rights noted.

In other words, more American women will perish.

Most Americans support access to abortion, which was protected by Roe v. Wade. Support for legal abortion access has only grown since the Roberts Court overturned that precedent and as reporters continue to document the deadly harms of restricting legal access to abortion care. Abortion is more popular than either the former or current president. It is more popular now than at any time since Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, decades ago. Even most Catholics in America support access to abortion. Many Jewish synagogues teach that women have a moral right to choose. Some Islamic schools instruct that abortion is permissible before “ensoulment,” which is deemed to occur at 120 days (and also allow the procedure later to save a woman’s life). American Buddhists generally support being able to make a choice whether to continue a pregnancy, as do many Christian denominations, such as the United Church of Christ, which views choice as a human right, and the Unitarian Universalists and other religious groups. Many secular groups devoted to ethics and freedom also support that choice.

But a highly vocal and hugely well-funded minority wants to block access to abortion for others, whose freedoms in a secular democracy should not be bound by someone else’s religious dictates. Recognizing the deep unpopularity of banning abortion, some of these very special interests—fueled mostly by rich men trying to make their personal agendas into binding law—have turned to the unelected, unaccountable Roberts Court to make their ambitions a reality.

Since John Roberts became the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, American women have been losing their liberty. Starting with the Gonzales v. Carhart decision through the Dobbs ruling and its aftermath, the Roberts Court has made it increasingly difficult for American women to get the medical care they need, to follow their doctor’s advice to protect their health when they are pregnant and confronted with a heart-wrenching diagnosis like cancer that needs treatment, or when a severe fetal abnormality is detected. Women are dying because John Roberts agreed that states can restrict access to abortion well before a fetus is viable. The result of Roberts’s rule over our nation’s highest court is that American women are less safe and less free. The dystopia that the narrow-minded Roberts has unleashed with the help of his fellow Republican justices is deeply destructive of our liberty and to women’s power to choose their own destinies.

In the meantime, I will take some consolation from the fact that Roberts has lost his manufactured shield of faux neutrality, as more and more people understand that he and his Court cannot be trusted to do justice for all. That will have to suffice for now as we build a movement to reform the Court and repair the enormous damage his Court has caused to millions of people’s rights.

Editor’s note: this article was adapted in large part from Lisa Graves’s new book “Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights” (from Bold Type Books).  This past January 22nd was the 53rd anniversary of Roe V. Wade, which originally guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion but was overturned by the Roberts Court in 2022. 

Lisa Graves is Executive Director of TrueNorth Research, President of the Board of the Center for Media and Democracy/PR Watch, and chair of the Editorial Board at The Washington Spectator. A national expert in the investigation of right-wing dark money groups, she previously served as the Chief Counsel for Nominations on the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, and as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice, among other roles.

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