When the U.S. Supreme Court announced the Dobbs decision in June 2022, officially upending decades of legal precedent established by Roe v. Wade, many in the anti-abortion movement celebrated a long-sought victory.

The new book, “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America» by Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer, explores the decade preceding the Dobbs decision and the political apparatus that made it possible.

The authors, both New York Times journalists, joined us on Texas Standard to talk about the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity:

Texas Standard: What inspired the two of you to write about this topic? And how long has this book been in the works? Do any of you feel free to give it a try?

Elizabeth Dias: I’ve covered religion, Lisa has covered politics, and particularly the impact on women, for much of our careers.

We have noticed that the right is becoming more and more radical and aggressive on this issue. And at the time of oral arguments in the Supreme Court case that ultimately overturned Roe, we decided that this was clearly happening. This will be the future whether America is ready for it or not or whether it has realized it or not.

And we really felt like it was our responsibility as journalists to take a serious historical look at how America got here.

What happened in the investigative work you two did?

Lisa Lerer: We relied heavily on the resources we had accumulated over twenty years of reporting on religion, politics and abortion. We conducted numerous interviews, over 300 interviews, with people at all levels – from activists in local groups to the highest levels of government.

And in reality, what we did was create the first history of the fall of Roe. We looked at the last decade, which we call the “final decade of the Roe era,” during which the pace of the anti-abortion movement’s efforts really accelerated to achieve the long-standing goal of eliminating abortion. And we ended up putting together a timeline of all the events that had happened during that time.

So this was an in-depth, in-depth look at that ten-year period that I think helps explain how we got here. And our thought is this: If you understand how the country got here, you can better understand where it could go, especially as we stand on the eve of this crucial election.

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Throughout this book, you follow Cécile Richards, who has significant ties to Texas. Her mother was Governor Ann Richards, and I think when she was 16 she helped her mother campaign for Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who won Roe v. Wade when Weddington was running for Assembly Texas State Legislature.

But there is this other figure, Marjorie Dannenfelser, who is on the other side of this debate. Tell us more about Dannenfelser, in particular, if you like.

Elizabeth Dias: If you think about the women, particularly on the right, who have been at the forefront of figuring out how to overturn Roe, Marjorie was one of the key leaders of that movement.

She is also a Southern North Carolina woman. She became a Catholic and has truly dedicated her entire professional life—from arriving in Washington after college in the early ’90s to the present—to overturning Roe. And not just overturn Roe, but figure out how to end abortion altogether.

And her organization at the time was called the Susan B. Anthony List – now it’s Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. And in the ’90s, you know, people weren’t paying much attention to her and her work or to the young conservative women who were galvanized against the rise of liberal feminism that women like Hillary Clinton and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were bringing to Washington at that time.

They took a very long-term view of how they were going to end abortion and really remake American womanhood and what it means to be a woman in the United States today. And they were very successful.

Cécile Richards, of course, was president of Planned Parenthood. She started with Planned Parenthood in 2006, and she sounded the alarm about threats to Roe a long time ago.

But I think there was sort of a misconception among many that maybe there was so much precedent around Roe in the years since the decision was handed down that the prospect of Roe actually being threatened n t was not quite the imminent danger that Richards perhaps thought. Do you think I’m wrong?

Lisa Lerer: I think, in a way, Roe was falling from the moment the decision was made.

Basically, starting within a year of the decision, Republicans and anti-abortion leaders began chipping away at the measure – limiting access to abortion rights, requiring doctors to obtain qualifications special and all those things that made it more difficult to have an abortion. And then what we’re documenting over the last decade, they really hit the precedent itself.

First, obviously, the change of court allowed this. And once they were able to latch onto Trump, Trump put the judges in place, and then they started crafting a series of laws that would take direct aim at Roe. So it was a very long process that spanned this entire 50-year arc, but has really accelerated over the last decade.

But I think part of it was because Roe had been a part of American life for 50 years and was really a part of how people thought about their families and how women thought about their reproductive lives, it was difficult for many Americans to imagine that it could simply disappear. It was just something that was kind of there. So when it finally happened, even though the anti-abortion movement had been building momentum for so long and so methodically, it really came as a shock to a lot of people in the country.

Was there a time when it seemed, in hindsight, that Roe v. Wade was doomed to fail? We must of course think about the appointments of judges to the Supreme Court, which always constitute a central point. Was this the tipping point of what we’re talking about?

Elizabeth Dias: I think the reality is that it’s an accumulation of events – and obviously the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump dramatically changed that.

The anti-abortion movement decided to support him and take every opportunity to shape his administration in their image. And there were moments that no one could have predicted, including the death of Justice Scalia just before the 2016 election and the way Republicans responded to it. And of course, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just before the 2020 election, cementing what ended up being an anti-abortion majority on the Supreme Court.

As you said, this book is not just about what happened in the past. It’s about what this tells us for the future. And I wonder where that leaves both movements today. Do proponents of reproductive rights have a similar strategy to defeat Dobbs as their opponents did with Roe?

Lisa Lerer: The politics have become completely muddled. I think that was something that a lot of people on both sides were not prepared for.

Roe has not been a deeply motivating issue for the Democratic Party, in part because many of its supporters didn’t really think it was in danger. And then Roe fell. And all of a sudden, abortion rights are probably the best thing Democrats have to do in the midterms and in this election as well.

The anti-abortion movement is therefore really struggling to find its way. They had benefited from this broad feeling of denial that they no longer had. And so you see in the way that Trump is moving all over the issue, how a lot of Republican candidates have sort of run away from their previous positions opposing abortion rights.

But that being said, there is no long-term abortion rights strategy to restore this right. They are currently working on it. There is a coalition of groups trying to come up with some sort of ten-year plan.

But the reality is that it’s really difficult. There is no magic wand that a Democratic president can wave to restore federal abortion rights. The bill would have to be submitted to Congress and the Senate and the bar would have to be very high for it to be adopted. And there’s not even agreement on what enshrining abortion rights in federal law would look like.

Even after the passage of Roe, there was a long debate among legal and policy scholars and thinkers that reproductive rights as we know them under Roe will never be truly guaranteed without a constitutional amendment. You will always fight for this with every appointment to the Supreme Court, with every change in political dynamics beyond reproductive rights. Given what we’ve seen in the polls, will this ever happen?

Lisa Lerer: There are people who want this to happen. But that’s a very high bar to get and pass a constitutional amendment, especially in an environment where the country is deeply, deeply polarized.

So I think in the abortion rights movement, this is certainly not seen as the best route to codifying abortion rights. And what we saw them do was what they could do in the quickest way possible, which was codify the right to abortion in various state constitutions. And it’s also on the ballot in many places this election cycle.

And they will be successful. So far, each of these referendums has passed. This may not be the case this year, we don’t know yet. But we certainly expect the majority of them to be adopted.

So that’s the approach they’re taking because that’s what I think is feasible and politically viable in the eyes of abortion rights advocates and the Democrats who support them.

“The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America” will be presented at Texas Book Festival in Austin during the weekend of November 16-17.

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