By ROBERT L. TSAI and MARY ZIEGLER
06/25/2023 07:00 AM EDT
Robert L. Tsai is professor of law at Boston University and the author of Practical Equality: Forging Justice in a Divided Nation.
Mary Ziegler is a professor of law at Florida State University and the author of Abortion and the Law in America: Roe v. Wade to the Present.
We’ve had a year now to contemplate the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and what led up to the justices’ decision to overturn 50 years of jurisprudence and end the constitutional right to abortion. Many abortion rights supporters and others on the left blame the court’s Republican-appointed majority, seeing those judges as too politically partisan.
But we see something a bit different going on. To really understand why the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade, we think it’s crucial to see Dobbs as the triumph of two social movements and the rising influence of a distinctive kind of judge.First, there is the grassroots anti-abortion movement, which has long been in the trenches and seeks the elimination of elective abortions and recognition of fetal personhood. Second, there’s the elite legal conservative movement, which is motivated to restore what it describes as the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Since at least the 1980s, when conservative legal icon Robert Bork denounced Roe as an egregious example of judicial policymaking, these legal elites have also called for the undoing of abortion rights.
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