The fall of Roe didn’t create abortion inequality—it exposed the deep, enduring disparities that had long shaped who could access care and who could not.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 changed the entire landscape of abortion access and simultaneously revealed the inequities and fault lines operating during the Roe era. A new book When Roe Fell, published late last year, considers what didn’t change and how losing the protections of Roe has forced, enabled and perhaps even facilitated a new era of abortion.
The following is an excerpt from the introduction of When Roe Fell: How Barriers, Inequities, and Systemic Failures of Justice in Abortion Became Visible edited by Katrina Kimport.
Major moments in history do not always appear as such to the people living them. Others are obvious. The June 2022 majority decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was not a sleeper moment in history.
The majority ruled that there is no constitutional right to abortion, overturning a federal protection the same court had established in its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and subsequently upheld in its 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision.
Ostensibly, Dobbs returned jurisdiction over abortion to the states, with no federal check. State governments were free to create their own laws around abortion, however they wanted. In practice, the Dobbs decision paved the way for U.S. state governments to ban or severely restrict abortion.
The effects were immediate, visible and consequential. Within hours of the decision, facilities that provided abortions suspended their services, and people seeking abortions were turned away.
Within weeks, some facilities closed, unable to sustain operations when they were legally prohibited from conducting business, or they substantially reduced their services, offering general family planning care but not abortion. More significant changes followed, many of which came as a surprise and shock to the general public.
… The fall of Roe revealed long-standing—yet untested—assumptions about abortion and opened new opportunities to think about abortion, abortion seekers, abortion provision and abortion advocacy.
From a legal perspective, Dobbs was a bombshell, dramatically altering the geographical landscape of abortion legality and availability. But it did not occur in a vacuum.
It is worth pointing out an obvious but regularly overlooked fact: Dobbs would have little to no impact if it did not leverage existing social and political contention over (the meaning of) abortion.
If state governments, for example, did not take up the mantle of abortion opponents to impose bans and severe restrictions on abortion, no clinics would have stopped providing care, and no abortion seekers would have been turned away.
Dobbs occurred in a context: specifically, in a history of abortion care that had (already) failed to ensure reproductive autonomy in pregnancy for all.
In When Roe Fell, the chapter authors start from the premise that to understand the implications of a decision like Dobbs, we must first understand what abortion looked like historically, politically and practically leading up to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
To do so requires a subtle shift: Instead of focusing on the impacts of Dobbs—that is, what happened and continues to happen afterward—this volume places Dobbs in a longer history of abortion in the United States.
Such a framework positions Dobbs not just as a decision that did things, but also as a decision centrally about undoing.
Specifically, Dobbs overturned Roe and the cases since Roe that had upheld constitutional protection for abortion. It was the absence of a federal right to abortion—established in Roe in 1973 and overturned by Dobbs in 2022—that enabled state governments to implement severely restrictive laws and ban abortion.
Roe, however, was far from an uncritical success. As reproductive justice advocates pointed out decades ago, countless people faced significant and often insurmountable barriers to accessing abortion care under Roe.
Among the ways Dobbs is historically noteworthy is for what it did not change—and, perhaps, for what it made more visible about who the Roe legal regime served and who it failed.
Indeed, understanding how abortion care was organized and the lived experiences of abortion seekers and providers as well as abortion technologies, advocacy, and the intersections of race, class, gender and nation under Roe is integral to understanding the impact of overturning Roe.
In this volume, the chapter authors interrogate whether and how Dobbs failed to impact the practical experience of seeking and providing abortion. It may have been a legal bombshell, but Dobbs might also be of only marginal consequence to the people who had been already left out under Roe.
Moreover, positioning Dobbs as an undoing enables scholars to think beyond the logic of Roe and explore what the elimination of its precedent can afford. As readers will discover, the fall of Roe revealed long-standing—yet untested—assumptions about abortion and opened new opportunities to think about abortion, abortion seekers, abortion provision and abortion advocacy.
Recognizing this and its consequences at this historical moment is essential for anticipating what might happen next in the ongoing social and political contention over reproductive autonomy and freedom.
Excerpted from When Roe Fell: How Barriers, Inequities, and Systemic Failures of Justice in Abortion Became Visible, edited by Katrina Kimport. Copyright 2025 by Katrina Kimport. Used with permission of the publisher, Rutgers University Press.
