Amy Littlefield on Her New Book: Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights

From an IRS agent who originally penned the Hyde Amendment to the lawmakers involved in creating parental consent laws, there are several actors in the antiabortion movement’s fight to dismantle Roe v. Wade. Amy Littlefield, abortion access correspondent at the Nation, freelance abortion writer, and author of Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights, sits down to talk with us about the motives, means, and opportunities behind the antiabortion movement's victory, and helps us more closely unpack the murder of Roe. 

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Transcript

Jennie: Welcome to rePROs Fight Back, a podcast on all things related to sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. [music intro]

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Jennie: Hi, rePROs. How's everybody doing? I'm your host, Jennie Wetter, and my pronouns are she/her. So, y'all, I am really looking forward to this week's interview. And it is a little bit on the longer side, so we'll keep the intro short, but it is definitely a great conversation you're gonna want to check out. So, this past week was my birthday week, and I was also at the NFPRHA annual meeting, and it was so much fun. I got to see um some people who've been on the podcast before, but I hadn't met in person. I got to finally meet them in person. I got to catch up with some friends that I don't get to see in person very often. So, it was wonderful to see them and catch up and meet some new great people in repro that I hadn't met before and talk to them about rePROs Fight Back and the podcast and the report card and some briefs that we're highlighting right now. It was just, it was a lot of fun to get to see everybody and talk about all the things. But I'm also now really tired and ready to take this coming weekend, which for you would be this past weekend, to catch up and get some rest and just like recharge. I am inherently an introvert, so having to do three solid days of manning a booth is um a lot of people for me. So, my batteries are a little worn down. So, I need to take some time to recharge. So, this weekend, I'm off on Friday. I'm gonna get my hair cut and then hopefully spend some time outside. It's supposed to be really nice this weekend in DC, so I am looking forward to having my windows open. I'm sure the kitties will be very excited to sit in open windows and enjoy the weather, and yeah, just have a really chill weekend to recharge my batteries, is my whole plan for the weekend. And I'm very much looking forward to it. I think with that, we'll go to this week's episode because, like I said, it is a bit of a longer episode, but I am so excited for y'all to hear it. We were talking to Amy Littlefield about her new book, Killers of Roe, My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights. And y'all, it is so good. I really, really, really recommend it. It's written like a murder mystery; it's got Agatha Christie quotes at the starts of all the chapters. It is so my jam. It hits so many things that I love. I just, it's so good. I cannot sing its praises enough. We'll make sure to have a link in our show notes to a bookshop page where you can buy her book. Yeah, highly recommend it. And with that, let's go to my interview with Amy. Hi, Amy. Thank you so much for being here.

Amy: Hi, Jennie. It is so great to be with you.

Jennie: I'm very excited to have you on to talk about your new book that came out today. Congratulations.

Amy: Thank you so much.

Jennie: This is one of those, like, I'm such a huge reader. So, whenever I have somebody on [the podcast] who's written a book, it's a bit like magic to me. Like, you did this thing that I love. And I love the book. It's so fun to have to be able to talk to you about it.

Amy: Thank you so much. It is a delight to talk to someone as thoughtful as you who has read it, and who's ready to take this deep dive into the weird history I was writing about.

Jennie: Yes. Okay, before we like dig into the book, would you like to introduce yourself?

Amy: Sure. So, I'm Amy Littlefield. I am the abortion access correspondent at The Nation, and I've been a freelance reporter on abortion rights for many years. I've written for the New York Times Opinion, for Reveal and Mother Jones, and covered abortion for about a decade before I set out to do this sort of deep dive into the history of how we lost Roe v. Wade for my book, Killers of Roe.

Jennie: This book hit me in like so many spots of, like, one, I would have read it no matter what, because I think you're wonderful and I love talking to you. And so, I would have read it anyway. And then, I started reading it and I was like, oh, oh, she's got this really unique way that she's telling it that hits me in all my, like, special places with, like, murder mystery and Agatha Christie and all the things. So, let's talk a little bit about the frame you used for the book.

Amy: Yeah, so Killers of Roe is framed as a real-life whodunit. And it started out because honestly, I needed a way to sort of entice myself to tell a pretty dark and at times sad and enraging history of how we lost abortion rights. The sort of Cliff Notes version of how we lost abortion rights is like this is a lot of women dying preventable deaths or having their rights infringed upon at the behest of policies passed by men who believed in many cases that they had a direct line to God Himself. Okay. And I knew I was gonna have to go out and talk to those people and listen to them for extended periods of time to tell the story that I needed to tell. And so, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died and it became clear that we were gonna lose Roe v. Wade, I had been covering abortion already at that point for many years. I knew what her death meant. I knew what was gonna happen next. And I knew that it was sort of the final piece in this puzzle. I've been watching the anti-abortion movement assemble incrementally for years. And at the time when that happened, I had a five-month-old. So, I was in like the fog of new parent life, and it was the height of the COVID pandemic. So, I was like in this anxious little sleepless bubble of like new mom-hood, and I felt so angry. And the only thing that I could read in that moment, and other people who've been in the trenches of like really any difficult moment, like I don't think it's just new parenthood. I think I first came across Agatha Christie when I was a teenager because that was just like such a little refuge for me as an awkward adolescent going through puberty. And I returned to that comfort in new motherhood. Like, I was listening to Agatha Christie audiobooks and just sort of disappearing into these chintzy little drawing rooms and these stories where the detective always sets everything right in the end. So, those two things sort of combined. And a murder mystery paradigm actually started to feel like the perfect way to tell this story because we already sort of know. I'm sure anyone listening to this podcast knows the big characters who overturned the right to abortion, right? We know about Alliance Defending Freedom, constructing the incremental laws, and then the Supreme Court case. We know about Leonard Leo and the quest to take over the Supreme Court, and of course the election of Donald Trump. But I was really interested in the grassroots figures and the behind-the-scenes people, and the people who, in a murder mystery, you would think of as the quiet housekeeper, right? You don't realize you didn't notice them, they were there in the background, and then at the end the detective says, you, you're the one who did it, and it's the person you least suspected, right? That's the big payoff in a mystery. And as I went along reporting on each section looks at the death of a real person and then digs into the people behind that death and the policies behind that death and sort of the motives and opportunities that were at play there that we might not expect. And so, I found some really interesting people you would least suspect along the way, like the IRS attorney and devout Catholic who wrote a first draft of the Hyde Amendment, the ban on federal funding of abortion that of course endures is about to mark its 50th anniversary this year. I found a former Indiana state lawmaker aging away in Kokomo, who had played a key role in the death of in the parental consent law in Indiana that led to the death of Becky Bell. So, I went around, trying to talk to as many of these behind-the-scenes figures as I can to really understand the sort of how the anti-abortion movement pulled off what I think is one of the most monumental political victories of our time.

Jennie: Yeah, I totally get the, like, turning to, like, the comfort read of, like, a murder mystery, like the Agatha Christie murder mystery in particular, because there was always like not necessarily a happy ending, but there was like an end, right? They caught the bad guy. And I went through the similar, like my dad died three years ago. And so, with all of the stuff of dealing with like the loss of Roe, and like it was just like all the things, and so my reading really took a turn towards romance in that era for that same reason. Like you, yes, there may be some ups and downs in the book, but there was always going to be a happy ending, and just that comfort of like I can't have this extra level of stress in my life, it was really how I had what I had turned to as well, and like delving into the world of also cozy mysteries and stuff.

Amy: Yes, and I'm so sorry to hear about your dad, and also, I relate to that so much of just turning to these comforting escapist books in times of personal grief and also collective grief, right? Which is really what the loss of the right to abortion was. It was this sort of moment—and the COVID pandemic as well—of collective loss and mourning. And I think similarly, like murder mysteries are comforting, partly because they're escapists, but also like one of the things I came to realize as I went along is that the murder mystery offers you this sense of justice and closure. There's a big reveal where the detective says, You, you did it, and oh my gosh, it's this person I didn't suspect. And then often there's a confession. The person's like, I did it, and I'm sorry. Sometimes they commit suicide on the spot, you know, like some it's often this big dramatic moment of like some level of remorse on the part of the killer. And I was trying in a way to, like, recreate those moments. I would talk to the people responsible for policies that had resulted in the death of Rosie Jimenez, who of course was the first person to die from the Hyde Amendment when she couldn't get her abortion covered under Texas Medicaid. I would do it with the man who had helped bring about the policy that resulted in the death of Becky Bell. I did it with Randall Terry, right, the leader of the rescue movement, which, you know, the rhetoric he used, of course, is credited with contributing to the deaths of many abortion providers in the 1990s and beyond. And I didn't get that moment. I didn't get a confession. I didn't get a big expression of guilt and remorse. And so, I had to think about other ways that people on the right side of history that abortion rights defenders are finding a way to create justice because history does not offer us neat endings in the way that murder mysteries often do.

Jennie: I was also struck by how some of the people really just like, "well, that wasn't my fault. Like, that was totally on her. And it wasn't because of the law I passed, it was their choices," and just some of it just seemed so callous, and putting so much distance between what they did and the policy they set up that created those conditions.

Amy: Right. I mean, there's this moment. So, when I interviewed one of- the first story I tell in the book is about this man, Paul Herring, who was an early anti-abortion leader. He had this sort of flair for long-shot creative lawsuits for restricting abortion rights. He had served as an early leader of Americans United for Life, which he told me he did as a volunteer. So, I guess they didn't have money to pay him back in those days. So, he was working for the IRS and kind of subsidizing his anti-abortion activism with his federal government paycheck. And he had pitched an idea for the Hyde Amendment to the Catholic leadership in 1974, so two years before it actually passed. So, he was this interesting sort of behind-the-scenes figure. And we spoke for many hours. His goal was to try to convert me to Catholicism. My goal was to try to get him to talk to me about the Hyde Amendment, which at first he was hesitant to do, but we got there. And it was really interesting to peer into his motives. And there was this moment, it happened for the first time in my interview with him, where I told him about Rosie and explained how she had died this awful, painful death, leaving behind a four-year-old daughter, because she'd been forced to seek an unsafe abortion when her Texas Medicaid would no longer cover a safe one. And there's this moment where I describe like the two of us just sitting looking at each other across a table and the clock ticking in the background. And I felt like he was a wall and I was a wall. And we could both look at this historical moment and see it in completely different ways, right? Like to him, Rosie Jimenez, the women who died seeking abortions, they did something wrong, right? They, in the anti-abortion point of view, they killed a baby. So, there were limits to which, you know, I was trying to deep listen my way to a really a deeper understanding of abortion opponents, right? I really wanted to understand motives beyond, like, they hate women and want to control them. I really wanted to keep an open mind and understand deeply what drove these people. And I did find some really surprising, you know, motives along the way. And but I think there were limits in the degree to which I could find common cause. And that was one of those moments where that, like, stuck out to me, where it was like we can, you know, we could find moments of grace and moments of listening and understanding, but there's a fundamental difference when it comes to how we view these tragic and preventable deaths.

Jennie: I also found particularly interesting the chapters where it was taking a closer look at us in our in our movement. And so the second death of Rosie Jimenez— that chapter really stood out our section, it really stood out in my mind of like looking back at the ways that the repro rights movement failed to continue pushing around Hyde, even while they said it was important that they just didn't use that as a rallying cry, other than it felt like for fundraising. And then as soon as that wasn't giving back enough, they switched tactics. And so, I thought that was really important to also be taking a look at the ways that we failed.

Amy: I'm so glad you brought this up because this is one of the parts of the history that I'm most excited to talk about with listeners of your podcast, because there was a lot in the story of how the pro-choice movement responded to the Hyde Amendment that really surprised me, right? Like, I think the story we've often been told is like, or that we've all often assumed, is like the Hyde Amendment passed in 1976. It's named for Henry Hyde, of course, the Republican Congressman who gave it its name. And I found these interesting behind-the-scenes figures who helped orchestrate it. But then once it passes, I think, like, we have this idea that the pro-choice movement was led by white women, and so they didn't really bother fighting the Hyde Amendment, right? That's kind of always what I had been told.

Jennie: Yeah.

Amy: And when I dug into it, what I found actually is that when the Hyde Amendment was being passed in 1976, there was a huge amount of resistance to it. I went through the archives for NARAL [National Abortion Rights Action League, now Reproductive Freedom for All] from back then and talked to a woman named Carol Warner who was a lobbyist for NARAL in that era. She described to me how when she joined the organization, it was like this shoestring operation. They had an office in what she described as like a CD area near the Capitol. Like her husband used to come walk her home from work because he didn't like the idea of her being there alone. They had no furniture at one point, and she was like sitting in this office with her typewriter. And meanwhile, her opponent, who's thrown their weight behind getting the Hyde Amendment passed, is the full weight of the Catholic Church, right? It's like Carol versus the Catholic hierarchy. And they were doing things like there was a Democratic Congressman named Dan Flood who played it, was in charge of the subcommittee overseeing the bill that Hyde was attached to. And he started out being very against the Hyde Amendment. He was against abortion, but, like, this is a ban that targets poor people, and as plain as the nose on your face, it’s basically discriminatory—the arguments we would make today. But his district was heavily Catholic, and Catholic leadership got all the religious leaders in his diocese to write letters, and Dan Flood got thousands of letters saying that he needed to support the Hyde Amendment. And you can see in these memos Carol Werner being like, please, everybody, we have to stop this. At one point, she says, I can't even believe how bad it would be if this were to win, right? And oh my God, isn't that true? Here we are, 50 years later, the Hyde Amendment is still in place. And so, she was trying, but this was an instance where the opposition was so much stronger. So, that's one important piece to look at. And then it's like there were these other moments in history that I describe them as almost like smoking guns, right? And the second death of Rosie Jimenez and the way that the pro-choice movement sort of later accepted the Hyde Amendment or sort of had to see this ground. One of those moments, so I went through those sort of fundraising memos, which were NARAL and a lot of progressive and feminist groups worked with this fundraising consultant named Roger Craver, who's this super fascinating guy. I describe him as the father of the nonprofit industrial complex. So, he figured out how to help these groups raise money with this hot new technology, and the technology was sending letters to people's homes asking for money, right? Like that was the big hot, controversial new technology back then. And I talked to him and also to his counterpart doing that on the right-wing side, which was Richard Vigory. And so, I found in the archives this typewritten memo from 1978, which was a note from Roger Craver's fundraising firm talking about how NARAL was raising so much money. And in part, obviously, because at that point it was the biggest policy discussion by raising money off the Hyde Amendment, right? And so, he says NARAL has the hottest direct mail program in the liberal nonprofit sector, but that they were starting to see some indications that the great days of growth may be temporarily stalled. And he starts warning that they need a new institutional package. It has to be something other than one strictly revolving around the economic issues involved. In other words, we've been talking about the deprivation of rights for poor people, and we need to start thinking beyond that. And then there's another moment that sort of felt like a turning point too, and it happened a few years later, January 14th, 1981. So, six days before the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, which I think probably was like a 2016 moment, right? Back then, it was like in comes this super conservative guy who wants to slash the federal government, and who later anti-abortion groups would identify as the first pro-life president, right? And in he comes, and the idea of a human life amendment that's gonna ban abortion through the Constitution is being floated. So, in that moment of defeat, and the other thing that had just happened was in 1980, so just months before, the Supreme Court had upheld the Hyde Amendment. So, after it passed, I think pro-choice groups were really banking on what became their predominant strategy right up until the Dobbs decision, which was fighting anti-abortion policies and laws in court, and hoping that even though these policies might make it through, they would be able to stop them in court. And sometimes that strategy worked right up until it didn't. And this was a moment where it had really failed, where the Supreme Court upheld the Hyde Amendment. They ruled that just because everyone had a constitutional right to abortion, it didn't grant them the right to have it paid for, which they saw as an entitlement. So, in other words, “if you're poor, that's a you problem, not a we problem.” So, in this sort of low moment, right, the Hyde Amendment's been upheld, Ronald Reagan's about to be sworn in. This group of pro-choice leaders gathers for a meeting. And so, I tried to picture them as I'm reading this memo, right? It's a whole, it's like the leaders like Karen Mulhauser from NARAL, the legendary pro-choice attorney, Janet Benshoof was there, Faye Wattleton, who then was the head of Planned Parenthood, one of very few Black women leading one of these groups. And there's a conversation. The group talked about four areas in which they wanted to direct further discussion, and one of them was poor women. And in this memo, the notes from this meeting, it says the discussion of poor women produced agreement that this issue must be kept alive, but that the larger issue of the Human Life Amendment must take precedence for the time being. And I read that and I was like, oh, so was this it? Like, was this the moment where the movement was like, we've done everything we can on the Hyde Amendment, we need to triage here, we need to fight the idea of a national ban. And then it became clear in the fundraising records, too, that the threat of a national ban was much better at mobilizing fundraisers, at mobilizing even small dollar donors who were gonna want to contribute money to the cause and sign up. Like the idea of this impending threat of a national ban was a much more frightening thing. And I think it felt like an immediate threat at that moment, too. And so I was trying, you know, I talked to Faye Wattleton about this, I talked to Karen Mulhauser about this, I talked to all of these leaders about sort of the tough decisions that they had to make in that moment of sort of triaging the threats that were the most pressing. And so, it wasn't as sort of clean cut as I had initially imagined. And of course, Faye and a lot of the leaders of that time insisted to me they didn't give up on the Hyde Amendment. They always saw it as important. But I think throughout this history, you see that anti-abortion operatives were frankly better organized, right? And in this case, they had the president on their side. And Faye Wattleton was a nurse. So, I talk about her sort of running triage, dealing with the deadliest threats first. And at that time, at least that was a national ban.

Jennie: Yeah, and it just became then Hyde became this like common ground feels maybe a strong word, but the like the assumption that it would just be there. And so, it became like the talking point, right? Like the taxpayer dollars don't go to abortion, and then we continue the conversation from there. And then the next chapter really turns to another area that I think became kind of similar, which is the parental consent and notice laws.

Amy: Yeah. And I mean, I think this is a real area to look at democratic complicity as well, right? In mainstreaming policies like the Hyde Amendment. And it's really shocking to me just how many states passed these parental consent and notification laws. Like they became so popular even among liberals because it has this appeal when you talk about the idea that your daughter should have to come to you before she gets an abortion. And like, of course, you want your daughter to come talk to you before she gets an abortion. And it was really interesting to me to find in this history that a lot of blue states had passed these parental involvement laws. By the time Dobbs came around, all but 14 states had some form of parental involvement law. And so, this was all part of the sort of incremental death by a thousand cuts approach to overturning Roe v. Wade, and an example of when Democrats were complicit in that. And so I think the death of Becky Bell, which I talk about in this era, sort of was an example of a remarkable example of people impacted by these policies coming forward and saying, you know, this whole idea that your daughter, we should the law should force your daughter to come to you, you know, can put people's lives at risk. And so, Becky Bell was this teenager, you know, beautiful blonde young woman, like in any context except abortion, might have been seen as like the perfect victim, right? And she loved horses, loved animals, had posters of Marilyn Monroe on her bedroom wall, and she got pregnant and told a friend she didn't want to disappoint her parents by telling them because she loved them too much. And so, she kept it secret. She got an unsafe abortion, and she died of pneumonia brought on by a terrible infection contracted during the abortion. And her parents, remarkably, because they were sort of this typical Midwestern couple, not really political. And her mom, a friend, a childhood friend of Becky's, told me her mom was the mom who would come in and like bring cupcakes to class, and you know, and they at first were gonna keep it secret, and then they decided, you know what, we're gonna speak out about this. And they did, you know, and even came out to speak again with more contemporary efforts in in Indiana to double down on restrictions to abortion. And so, their message was really, hey, you might think this sounds like a great idea. Like, Becky's mom said this sounded like a great idea to me, you know, that that my daughter would have to come to me, but I would much rather she didn't come to me, and I never knew and she'd be alive here today.

Jennie: Yeah, it's one of those ones that really hit close to home being from the Midwest, and like you can see, like I had sex ed from a nun, and I went to Catholic school. So, like all of that shame and stigma that is built around, I mean, not just even abortion, just like reproductive health in general, and you can see how you would easily have those like fear of disappointing your parents and not wanting to talk to them. Some people may be in a place where that would be unsafe, but there are many reasons to not have that conversation with your parents, and that just puts the people who need care at risk.

Amy: Yeah, and there were multiple moments of division within the pro-choice movement about how to deal with these policies that come up time and again in this history because not everyone always thought it was a good idea to tackle these policies. The pattern is sort of, like, they came for the most vulnerable people first, right? We saw poor women with the Hyde Amendment, we saw young people with these parental involvement laws, and over time it became controversial within the movement about how best to go about shoring up abortion rights and whose rights could be sidelined in that process.

Jennie: Wow, this sounds really eerily familiar to the current moment for gender-affirming care.

Amy: Oh my gosh. I mean, the way that the playbook is exactly the same, and it's the same groups too. And why are they using the same playbook? Because it was successful. Because it was successful. So, they go after public funding, they go after parental consent and children first before adults. But we always know what the goal is, right? The goal is to ban this medical care completely so that trans people are unable to meaningfully participate in public life. And similarly for the anti-abortion movement, it was always about banning and ending abortion for everybody. And boy, are they frustrated that they have not been able to do that. The number of abortions has been going up since Dobbs. Shield law providers are sending pills into ban states. They're getting around-these bans are killing, still killing people, and we do need to remember that. But also, they're not working the way that the anti-abortion movement hoped they would. And so, they've been unable to stop the unstoppable, but it sure did a lot of harm along the way. And yeah, I think I've sat in some of these conferences where I've watched the same groups that dismantled abortion rights—you know, it took them 50 years, but they got there—are now training that playbook on trans lives. And we need to learn from the lessons of the past in terms of how to prevent this from happening again.

Jennie: So, the next section that I mean it just really stuck out with me because I cannot imagine sitting down and having conversations with Randall Terry. Like I just wow, I yeah, thinking through like the deaths of providers and clinic people who worked at clinics that I mean traced back to some of this rhetoric that was going on. Yeah, it's hard to imagine sitting down and having a longer conversation with him about the work he did.

Amy: Yeah, it was pretty, it was one of the more uncomfortable interviews I did just because of how it ended, too. Yeah. But basically, so Randall Terry, for those unfamiliar, um, was the leader of Operation Rescue. So, he was the man who didn't he didn't invent rescue, um, which I talk about in the book. It was there were a lot of women actually involved in that early history, um, who did not get as famous as Randall. But there he was, this charismatic leader, bringing people to the door of the clinic. They would do these massive blockades, sit down and go deadweight in the parking lot, be arrested in legions, pack the local jail, just these huge spectacles of people going deadweight in front of cars and chaining themselves up to clinic doors. And this was really coming to a head in the 1990s, and of course, coincides with the start of the murders of abortion providers, right? And some of Randall's tagline was “if abortion is murder, then act like it's murder.” And some people did just that, some extreme opponents of abortion did just that and started killing doctors and receptionists and clinic escorts and people at the clinic door and inside. And so, I met Randall in this interesting moment where he was running this long shot bid for president, which he does so that he can run super graphic ads of fetuses on television by exploiting laws that require TV stations to run that kind of content from candidates. And so he had showed up to Pre-vote Stand, which is the annual meeting of the Family Research Council, ahead of an election where the Family Research Council was very much backing Donald Trump, even though Trump had been pretty s soft on abortion in their point of view, was saying he was gonna veto a nationwide abortion ban. Like they were mad at him, but they were still backing him. And Randall got himself kicked out of this conference, and he had this bus outside with all this like cartoon imagery on it. And um so I got on the tour bus with him to talk with him. And again, it was this sort of similar sort of moment where I'm talking with him about the deaths that I think many would say resulted in part from his extreme rhetoric on abortion, and he did not, you know, take responsibility for that. But he also epitomized this like thread that runs through the book. One of them is like the way that these folks unapologetically and shamelessly saw themselves as civil rights leaders, like the way that they co-opted the civil rights movement. And the historian Jennifer Holland talks about in the 1960s and 70s, right, where the civil rights movement, where black Americans are forcing people to confront the harms of white supremacy, that for white sub white conservatives, the anti-abortion movement offered this sort of escape valve where they could instead join a parallel civil rights movement of their own that instead of grappling with whiteness, was co-opting the same language and directing it towards the fetus, who was almost always imagined as white, right? So, they could see themselves as civil rights champions or as abolitionists, and they were defending, you know, the purest cause of all, the mostly white baby. And this came up time and again, right? Like a lot of these true believers saw themselves completely unapologetically as civil rights icons, even though they were torching the rights of women of color in particular, and women more broadly, trans people as well. So, that really came through with Randall Terry. He had a Black pastor who was his running mate, and they were out there, you know, talking about themselves as John Brown— "was John Brown right or wrong?"— talking about themselves as, like, civil rights champions. And then, you know, of course, there's this beautiful moment at the end of the interview where Pastor Stephen Broden, who's the running mate, was like telling me that I'm purdy, with his Southern accent. And I was just sort of like, this is, you know, these pseudo-civil rights leaders who were just, like, harassing a woman. And I revisited, you know, Susan Faludi's like iconic profile of Randall Terry that she wrote for her book Backlash, and was like, this is just the same thing. It's the backlash against women's rights. It's these men sort of putting a woman "in her place" after I had spent hours trying to listen to him to get to a more nuanced motive. Like, I'm really not sure I did. Yeah, there were just these moments where I was sort of like, maybe it's not all that complicated, actually.

Jennie: And then the last chunk I found extra fun because it was like my baby days of working in this movement. I was still mostly doing work in the global space, but a lot of colleagues and friends I know were referenced in the section talking about the bans that have then... were the next death you were looking at.

Amy: Right, right. And I mean, of course, ProPublica's incredible reporting on the people who have died, the women who have died more recently as a result of abortion bans, right? Starting with the six-week abortion ban in Texas and then the total bans, the restrictions in places like Georgia. Those stories haunt me and stick with me. When I read about the woman whose, you know, son will chase after anyone who has her hairstyle on the street, shouting that's mommy, when I read about the woman who died in her bed because she was too afraid to seek follow-up care, and her three-year-old daughter was next to her by her side. And I think looking at the arc of all of these deaths, right, which if we're looking just at the post-Roe era that starts with Rosie Jimenez and the Hyde Amendment, Becky Bell and parental consent laws, of course, the rescue movement and the deaths of folks involved in clinic care, and then moving up to the women who are dying and have died today. I think the overarching question is like, why have those deaths not been enough? Like, why have those deaths not been enough to change the policies that we know are responsible? And that was one of the sort of mysteries I was trying to solve with this book, because sometimes one death is enough to change the course of history. And-

Jennie: Look at Ireland.

Amy: Yeah, I mean, and they were, you know, Ireland, they were really organized. That's part of the answer. I think if you talk to the activists there, they'll say they had there was more going on. It was not just a spontaneous uprising. And so, yeah, I'm trying to look at the arc of these deaths as well as sort of rooting us in this current moment where Roe is gone and so much tragedy, preventable tragedy, right? Like, that's the word that ProPublica uses again and again in these investigations, "preventable" deaths.

Jennie: Yeah and bringing it back to the murder mystery of it all, saying that really this is a real case of Murder on the Orient Express, of like—they all did it.

Amy: Right. They all did it, and they all had complicated, you know, reasons behind it. And I started out thinking about the history of the anti-abortion movement's success. And frankly, I do. I think they were one of the most successful social movements of our time. Like, they always represented a minority point of view, right? Very quickly after Roe v. Wade, more Americans supported it than opposed it. And yet, despite representing a minority point of view, they have been able to build alliances and rally the grassroots and win elections and maneuver their way to astounding success, right? I think even a few years before it happened, no one really thought Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned. So, with Murder on the Orient Express—and I feel bad because Agatha Christie would be mad that we're spoiling one of her most famous novels here, she hated that—but yeah, spoiler alert, they all did it. Okay, that's the end of Murder on the Orient Express. A whole bunch of people of all classes and backgrounds come together to kill one person with, you know, some stab wounds that were shallow and some that were deep, and some that were haphazard, and some much more deadly. And that really is, I think, an appropriate metaphor for the death of Roe was this incremental death by some policies that were really deep and some policies that were more haphazard and random. And I think like the thing that stuck with me as I looked at all of the sort of people behind this—the suspects, so to speak—behind this monumental victory, there was one motive that kept coming up time and time again in almost all of my interviews. And it was so, I thought about these people as being two categories of people: true believers and opportunists. You have the political opportunists, the people who are trying to get elected—the people like Ronald Reagan, the people like Donald Trump—who will change their views on abortion at the drop of a hat because they're trying to win office. And it's not the most important issue to them, right? And you can find those people on both sides of the aisle. And then the true believers, right? The people like Paul Herring, who I was meeting with, who'd played an early role in the Hyde Amendment, who really believed they were civil rights champions defending the "most innocent victim of all,” the fetus. And what I started to find is that the lines between those two types of people blurred as I went along, right? There were a lot of believers who were seeking opportunities, both personal and political, and plenty of opportunists, like I think Senator Bob Packwood, who I interviewed, who had this long history of sexual harassment and yet was also this huge proponent of women's rights, pro-choice Republican, you know, they were complicated. I think he believed in what he was doing. I also think he was an opportunist who got close to women, you know, as a result of his feminist points of view, and then exploited that for his own gain. But I want to come back to like this motive that I kept coming up against in my interviews with these anti-abortion activists time and time again. And it started in my interview with Paul Herring, where he was trying to convert me to Catholicism, right? And his pitch was like, “the most important thing is we go to heaven.” And he kept saying that to me, like, "the most important thing is we go to heaven." And like if you convert to Catholicism, your soul will be saved and you'll go to heaven. And it felt, it just felt so transactional to me. I was like, you are a believer, and yet I also like, is there any greater opportunity than heaven itself, right? And so, I kind of made a footnote of that when I interviewed him, and then it was like it kept coming up again and again in all of my interviews. Like when I talked to James Butcher, who is one of the lawmakers behind the parental consent law involved in the death of Becky Bell. He said that he had decided to accept Christ as his savior at the age of nine because he'd been thinking a lot about the length of eternity and decided he wanted to spend eternity with God and my family and friends. I talked to Bob Bauman, who was a lawmaker involved in the Hyde Amendment, and he said, "if I get any credit when I get to St. Peter at the gate, I hope that's on my list." Henry Hyde himself had written about sort of imagining this moment at the end of his life when his accomplishments would be tallied. Randall Terry was sort of the most bizarre iteration of this; same idea— he told me he lived with the daily notion in front of him that one day he would stand before his maker. And he told me, "I want to hear him say, 'Well done, good and faithful servant.'" And he said, "I'd love for him to reach out his hand and go, 'Randy, I'm so proud of you. You're a good boy, you did it.'" So, I don't know, it's this very kind of creepy, fatherly moment that he imagines getting from God. I heard so many versions of that, and it really forced me to think at the end of this book, like, is this history really a history of, like, men pursuing these policies that have shaped the lives of millions of people, millions of women? In some cases, led to their preventable deaths, in some cases, um, like the Hyde Amendment is blamed for more than one million people giving birth who otherwise wouldn't have. Like, has this really all been because these men believed that they were buying a ticket into heaven? And so, that was one of the motives that I found in this unfolding mystery that really surprised me, just because it was more nakedly opportunistic than I had imagined.

Jennie: Yeah, though that was, I mean, that was not, like, it was a really heavy thread through so many of their stories. It was, I want to say surprising, but again, with the like going to Catholic school K through eight and things I had heard growing up, like not super shocking in some ways, but still like I find yeah, some of them, like you said, a little disturbing. I don't know.

Amy: Like, okay. Yeah, and sad in a way too. Like, has all of this been at least in part because these men are focused on seeing their lives tallied up at the end? I mean, and then for some people, they definitely were imagining a reckoning here on earth, right? They were imagining getting credit for these anti-abortion policies here on earth as well. It wasn't just a celestial matter.

Jennie: I'm not a Catholic anymore. And I guess I can see the, like, thought of trying to think about, like, eternal, but to me, looking at it, I just see you're just thinking about yourself and not thinking about all of the people who are real people and alive and well living right now who are impacted by the choices you are making negatively.

Amy: Absolutely. And I guess I hope my book ends on a hopeful note, which is looking at the activists who are thinking about the people who have died from anti-abortion policies, who are keeping those names alive, who are pursuing long shot policies of their own, who are launching their own sort of incremental 50-year project to chip away at the encroachment on our rights that we have now. And I do think that that work is happening. I think the sort of quiet housekeeper figures that that I was able to identify on the anti-abortion side, that those folks exist on the right side of history too, and they are busy doing their work, and that work has taken on new momentum post-Dobbs. I mean, wow, the fact that the number of abortions has increased after the Dobbs decision, and the fact that we have people taking on great legal risk in states like New York and Massachusetts to mail abortion pills into states like Texas, so that today it is in some ways easier, more affordable for folks in red states to get access to abortion pills than it was before that work was happening. And I hope the book is hopeful for that reason and not just enraging and sad, although I think it is those things too. But I do feel hopeful because of the work of the people on the abortion rights side and what they're doing, often in the name of people like Becky Bell and Rosie Jimenez. There's a beautiful example that I use at the end of the book of the activists in Texas who introduce legislation every term to try to restore full reproductive freedom in Texas. And they know it's not gonna pass this year, it's probably not gonna pass next year, but they keep doing it because that turns out to be the way that victories happen, right? If we can learn anything from the anti-abortion movement, it's that. And so, they introduce it every year, or every term, and it’s named for Rosie Jimenez. It's called Rosie's Law. And so, there are these places where these people are remembered.

Jennie: Okay, so I always like to wrap up with getting the audience involved. So, what should the audience be doing right now? Like what can the audience do in this moment?

Amy: You know what's really coming to mind for me right now, Jennie— I just finished working on a a piece for the New York Review of Books that's really a big picture look at the abortion access landscape right now. And what a lot of the activists I spoke to for that piece talked about is that right now information is almost, it's, like, the driving force in access right now. Like people having access to information to websites like I Need An A, to websites like Plan C Pills, places like Abortion Finder. These hubs where they can find information about abortion access. Plan C told me they've circulated, I think it's close to five million stickers. So, if you're someone who like me has just like seen a Plan C sticker on like the wall of a bathroom stall or like a light post, or you know, so I think about access to information and how people can can just be aware of that and share that. And I want to include those websites in all the media appearances that I do, understanding that perhaps there might be someone listening who needs help with understanding what their options for an abortion are, even in red states.

Jennie: I love that. I always talk about how it's so important to make yourself a place where people can go to get trusted information. And I don't mean that you need to know all the things. So, if your friend in Colorado calls and wants to know where they can get an abortion, you don't need to know the answer, but you know that you can send them to these places to get trusted information. And that's what's important in this moment.

Amy: I love that. You know, what that reminds me of is I interviewed Addie Bell, who was the niece of Becky Bell, and she is a young woman, like really trying to keep her aunt's legacy alive. She testified in the Indiana State Legislature post-Dobbs when they were trying to ban abortion outright. She had a big picture of her aunt and she was keeping her aunt's memory alive. And she told me, like, growing up, because she knew her aunt had died from an unsafe abortion, she was like the go-to person for her friends, like, when their abstinence-only sex didn't tell them what they needed to do to keep themselves safe. She was like, hey, you can go to the gas station and buy condoms, and like, hey, you could go to Planned Parenthood and get your STI tests. Like, she was that person that you're talking about because of this family history that she had. So, I love that you made that connection.

Jennie: Well, Amy, thank you so much for being here. And y'all, we only scratch the surface of Amy's book. It is so good. I highly, highly, highly recommend it. Definitely get your own copy.

Amy: Thank you so much, Jennie.

Jennie: Okay, y'all. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Amy. I really had so much fun talking to her about her book. And y'all, I seriously, I cannot sing its praises enough. I loved it. I am so glad I read it before we had our conversation. And I think y'all should check it out too. And with that, I will see everybody next week. [music outro] If you have any questions, comments, or topics you would like us to cover, always feel free to shoot me an email. You can reach me at jennie@reprosfightback.com, or you can find us on social media. We're at rePROs Fight Back on Facebook and Twitter, or @reprosfb on Instagram. If you love our podcast and want to make sure more people find it, take the time to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform. Or if you want to make sure to support the podcast, you can also donate on our website at reprosfightback.com. Thanks all.