“You Must Stand Up”: Amanda Becker on Chronicling the Fallout of Roe v. Wade’s Reversal

I’ve covered politics for most of my career, certainly for the past 15 years or so, and I knew immediately when I heard the oral argument in December 2021 that Roe was either going to fall or be severely scaled back — I knew that would not only be a healthcare story, but I knew it would also be a massive political story. I think it is probably the biggest political story that will happen in this country in my career. 

Abortion reordered our politics back in the ‘80s into the first bit of the ‘90s. The parties realigned in terms of who we elect around abortion and their positions on abortion. I thought it had the potential to drive another realignment in this country. I just felt, therefore, it was really important to be ready to tell that story.

The story of abortion rights is not one that I think has historically been done well by news organizations, to be honest. And I don’t think that it’s gotten the attention that it should have over the past decade or so.

I think right now, abortion is the political story. I just felt really strongly that there needed to be people in place, myself included, to give this story the attention that it needed.

So first of all, let’s start even before the leak. Obviously, the leak of the Dobbs decision was shocking. We’ve never seen a leak like that in recent memory from the Supreme Court. The fact that it took the average American by surprise is a failure of the news media, right? Because you shouldn’t have had to be very clued in and close to the topic to know how this was going to happen. 

Even in between the period of the leak and the decision, when I would talk to reporters who are friends in other newsrooms covering this topic, at major newsrooms, they would tell me things like, “My stories get taken down off the homepage within a couple minutes” [and] “Editors and producers tell me that abortion makes people uncomfortable, so we’re not going to feature this in the main show” — that type of thing.

My book makes the case that this decision affects all of us as Americans, but it certainly just affected half of America very directly. And to be giving short shrift to a story, because you think it might make people uncomfortable, but it affects half of the people who live in this country — that is a failure. 

I think that as newsroom leadership in particular gets more diverse in terms of gender and race and socioeconomics, these things will start to change. It still skews very white, very male, and older. Certainly, there are some newsroom leaders who realized what an important story this was. But I think that [others] made generalizations that [abortion] wasn’t something that people cared to read about. It also allowed a lot of misconceptions to continue to perpetuate. One of them — and you hear it repeated by the current president — is that abortion is a very divisive issue. But 64 percent to 70 percent of Americans support some form of legal access to abortion. That is higher than almost any other issue in this country. It’s not divisive in the electorate. It’s divisive in terms of who we’re electing because they’re completely lined up on one side or the other. But it’s not divisive for the electorate.

The way I see newsrooms kind of falling short sometimes is they have political reporters covering a story that is about politics, but it also requires an understanding of constitutional law [and] understanding of reproductive healthcare. 

A great example is when the Republican National Committee put out its party platform at the beginning of its convention that was reported by nearly every news organization as “the Republican Party softening its stance on abortion” because it did not have anything in there about a 20-week ban or passing federal legislation. It says —  and I’m paraphrasing here, “We will support states’ ability to, after 51 years — which is a direct reference to Roe — enact 14th Amendment rights for everyone.”

Now, what does that mean? That means 14th Amendment rights for fetuses and embryos, and that is synonymous with something that’s called fetal personhood. Fetal personhood is bestowing legal rights, constitutional rights, on fetuses and embryos, sometimes from the moment of fertilization, depending on who you’re talking to and what they want. Fetal personhood is certainly more extreme than a 20-week ban, and yet, if you pull up clips from that day, there are only a couple of newsrooms that got it right.

I always knew I wanted to choose a variety of states. I wanted to show: what does it mean to have a right that people had for 49 years nationally now controlled by the states? This isn’t a story you could tell from one place in this country, because … depending on where you live, you have dramatically different rights and dramatically different access to reproductive healthcare right now.

I knew that one of my settings had to be somewhere with a strict abortion ban. A lot of those states are in the South. So I started looking for somebody who was open to the idea of me spending some time with them at what was — and remains — one of the most stressful periods of their professional careers, if not their life overall.

I knew I wanted somewhere out West, where things were kind of in flux. In the weeks after the decision, there were three different laws on the books in Arizona, and nobody knew which one was going to apply. Not even the anti-abortion lawmakers knew which one they wanted. They couldn’t agree. 

I’m from Ohio, so I was paying close attention to what was happening there with attempts to kind of subvert the will of the people who were signaling that they were about to pass a measure protecting abortion rights. The anti-abortion Republicans in the state House [of Representatives] were doing everything they could to stop that. 

The book is showing [how] this patchwork we have of abortion laws, depending on what state you live in, can be an indicator of how healthy our democracy is, both overall and in specific places. Gerrymandering [is an issue] and I get into that in several chapters: Wisconsin, Alabama, Ohio. Ballot measures as well. That’s why I was in Kentucky, talking about how the person [on] the side with the most money almost always wins in the ballot measure campaign. They’re intentionally confusing in many cases, so it requires a high level of literacy to even engage on ballot measure questions.

I was wanting to not only show the patchwork of abortion laws, but also kind of take a temperature test of how our democracy is doing in different areas of this country. I frame it as a democracy issue, because in a democracy, if 64 percent  to 70 percent of people want something, then that should be the law, right? So I was trying to explain to people, how did we end up in a situation where in a large portion of our country there are laws that the people do not want?

So there’s only a couple of instances in which I only use a first name. I was able to get their trust simply because they were working at a clinic [in Arizona] where I had the trust of the doctor, Dr. Goodrick, who let me talk to them. A couple of them hadn’t really thought through whether they wanted their full name in there, and some of them were quite young. You make decisions when you’re 22 that are different than decisions you make when you’re 45 or 60. I just wanted to give them the option of not having this book come up every time they were Googled for the rest of their life. 

In other scenarios, for example, in the chapter in Wisconsin, I spoke to probably a dozen medical students [most part of the group Medical Students for Choice] and chose to feature one because she was the most comfortable having her full name used. 

I think just having very candid conversations to get someone comfortable is important, especially for a long-term project, right? You’re developing a kind of a relationship with people, and you’re coming back to them again and again and again. 

Part of it is just choosing subjects who have a degree of comfort, part of it is having people vouch for you, and part of it is just being very clear about what the process is: This is what I’m working on. This is the type of chapter that you would be in. This is how I would be using you as a, quote-unquote, character to help tell this part of the story. You will hear before it is published what’s going to be in it. A fact-checker will call you.

The average person doesn’t really know how a journalist works. I cover politics every day, and politicians certainly understand, but the average person doesn’t. I just think there’s a much heavier lift in terms of educating them about what this process will and should look like, to put them enough at ease that they feel comfortable talking in a way that’s candid.

I have not, but I don’t think that many people from the anti-abortion movement are probably reading my book. And for probably obvious reasons, it’s just not something that would excite them.

I decided to do it because that is a term that they came up with for themselves. And if one side of an issue is “pro-life,” then what does that make the other side? It suggests very directly that they are “anti-life” and I didn’t feel that was an accurate or fair way to describe the abortion rights movement. It’s much more complicated than that, and I think that’s very objective. Newsrooms generally don’t use “pro-life” anymore. 

The anti-abortion movement was very effective over that time period I was discussing earlier — when newsrooms weren’t doing a great job covering this issue. To be quite honest, the anti-abortion movement is very effective at getting newsrooms to use the language that they want. 

For example, you will see leaders in the anti-abortion movement complaining, demanding corrections, tweeting about [how] they don’t think the phrase “abortion bans” are fair. So if I write the phrase “six-week abortion ban,” they will say that’s not accurate, because abortion isn’t banned. It’s only banned at six weeks. They’ve been much more successful for decades at kind of getting their talking points and their language into mainstream news organizations. And I think that really benefited them, because it’s always great to have things framed exactly how you want them, right? I think it distorted the argument about abortion. 

I have someone who keeps writing reviews on every platform that they’re mad that I used “abortion rights,” not “reproductive rights,” and this is someone who supports abortion. If I was ever able to have a conversation with them about this, what I would say is: I also chose the phrase “abortion rights” really intentionally, because for so many years that word wasn’t used that often when talking about abortion. It was like euphemisms, “terminate a pregnancy,” things like that. I think that words are powerful and accuracy is powerful, and if what you’re talking about is abortion, use the word “abortion,” not “pro-life,” not “pro-choice.” It’s “anti-abortion” and “abortion rights.”

There’s more than one way it could play out. It could be that the issue of abortion rights drives more and more women and more and more young people into the Democratic Party. So that’s one outcome, and we’re seeing that right now. It could just be Democrats become the party of young people and women and everybody else [is for] the Republican Party. Republican women were saying [in the 80s] “Please don’t make this the party that’s anti-abortion, because long term is going to be devastating for us as a party.”

Another way this could realign: Republican candidates heeding the advice of those women who were warning Republicans so many years ago not to do this. And we’re starting to see this. There are a couple of House candidates in places outside New York City, in Southern California, running ads saying, “I will never support a federal abortion ban. I will not override the will of the people,” because they know they need to support what their electorate supports to get through their race. 

I don’t know where the realignment is going to end up. But I do think we’re at the beginning of something right now that will look back and will be a different country in terms of the electorate once it’s finished than when it started.