From New York Times, I'm Michael Babbaro. This is a daily.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, the Court's conservative majority argued

it was simply handing the question of abortion to the states and their voters to decide for

themselves. But in reality, the Court was ensuring that many states from Arizona

to Ohio would immediately ban the procedure without much debate because their legislatures

are now dominated by hard-line Republicans.

Today, my colleague Kate Sernicki, with the story of how those Republican legislators

achieved that dominance.

It's Monday, July 11th.

So Kate, tell me about how your reporting started.

Well, we wanted a big story that would tell people when Roe was repealed how this happened.

And I sort of conceived of it as an obituary, really, for Roe.

If you think about an obituary, you think about what were the key moments in someone's

life when something turned.

And so I just started asking people, what was the turning point?

And what was so striking to me was that people on both sides of the debate said the exact

same thing, which is you have to look at 2010.

The abortion rights advocates felt really good.

They had more support in the U.S. Congress than they've ever had before.

They of course had President Obama in the White House.

And they started having all these real policy victories, several of them related to President

Obama's Affordable Care Act.

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