You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones.

I'm joined today by two guests, Deborah Friedel, a contributing editor at the LLB, who wrote recently on Roe v. Wade.

Her piece was a review of Joshua Prager's book, The Family Row, an American story. Hello, Deborah. Hello, Tom. And Laura Beers, who teaches history at the American University in Washington, D.C., and has written two pieces for the L.R.B. blog on reproductive rights. The first, when Donald Trump nominated Brett Covenant to the Supreme Court in 2018, and the second during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney-Barratt in 2020.

Hello, Laura, and thank you both very much for joining me.

Hello, Tom.

So on the 24th of June, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States

issued its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization,

taking away the constitutional right to abortion that was established in Roe v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, taking away the constitutional right to abortion

that was established in Roe v. Wade nearly 50 years ago. Everyone saw this coming since Trump's

appointments to the Supreme Court, but some people, grassroots activists, local reproductive

rights organizers, seem to have been better prepared than others, the democratic leadership,

for example. So did the opinion

come as a shock, Laura, even if it wasn't a surprise? Well, I think the opinion didn't come in a shock

as a shock at the moment that it dropped on June 24th because it had leaked a month beforehand,

which gave the wider public as well as the political establishment sometime to come to terms with

what was about to happen. But I think when that opinion leaked, it was a shock because the

assumption had been that well Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health was likely to be decided

on lines that would roll back Roe v. Wade that it wouldn't reverse Roe v. Wade, right? This was a

decision specifically about whether abortion could be limited before fetal viability, specifically

at 15 weeks. And to decide that it could, in this case, this Mississippi case, would have been a further curtailment of Roe,

which has been sort of suffering a death by a thousand cuts, basically, since it became established

law in 1973. The fact that five of the nine justices went further than that and used this as an

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