When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs decision in 2022, it was the culmination of a successful half-century movement to ban abortion. 

Despite the fact that 60 percent of Americans support abortion in all or most cases, it is now difficult to nearly impossible to get an abortion in most of the country. Forty-one states now have abortion bans, including 13 states with total bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. 

Vermont is one of just nine states that do not restrict abortion.

Who killed abortion rights?

Journalist Amy Littlefield set out to answer this in her new book, “Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights.” In it she chronicles her meetings with key figures in the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade, including a former IRS attorney, a gay conservative disgraced ex-congressman, and true believers who tried to convert Littlefield to their cause.

She also met the families of women who died as a result of not having access to safe abortion.

Amy Littlefield is the abortion access correspondent for The Nation. She has written about reproductive rights for The New York Times and is a frequent commentator for news outlets including MS Now, Democracy Now! and Reveal.

Littlefield said that seeking an abortion in parts of the country where it is restricted “can be a really terrifying and isolating experience.” Some people seeking an abortion are being charged with murder, and in other cases “we're seeing cases of women dying preventable deaths because they can't get treatment for rare and totally treatable consequences of medication abortion or for miscarriage.”

Despite the obstacles, the total number of abortions has risen since Roe v. Wade was overturned. This is partly due to the availability of medication abortion (commonly known as abortion pills), which now comprise over one-fourth of all abortions.

“I did not see that coming,” conceded Littlefield.

“The abortion rights movement had really been in a sort of defensive position for much of its history since the Roe decision, and so I did not see it coming that there was going to be this bold, creative legal experiment happening in real time that people were going to be participating in once Roe v. Wade was gone.”

Littlefield expects that abortion shield laws that protect providers and patients, such as Vermont passed in 2023, will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court and could be weakened or nullified. But she noted, “We're seeing the proliferation of community support networks of activists who are circulating medication abortion person to person or in nondescript envelopes delivered from one post office box to another.”



“Those efforts are pretty much untraceable and happening on a scale that no one has been able to fully measure or document.”