Times Scribes Launch The Fall of Roe, a Non-Partisan Account of Modern Abortion Rights

Reporters Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer were standing inside an anti-abortion pregnancy center in Ohio. It was June 24, 2022 and Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision that protected abortion rights, had been overturned.

The result of two years of work and more than 350 interviews, The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America (Flatiron Books) describes itself as the first non-partisan account of post-Roe abortion rights, and how this came to be. Speaking with New York Times Magazine writer and best-selling author Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Dias and Lerer discussed their book on June 10 at the 14th Street Y community center in the East Village.

“The political tale we uncovered is explosive,” Lerer said. “The battle over abortion...is what it means to be a woman.”

Lerer is a national political correspondent for Times, who has been covering politics for nearly two decades. Dias, the paper’s national religion correspondent, first joined forces with Lerer in 2018 when their coverage crossed over into broader American issues.

As the political landscape began to shift — especially on the Supreme Court — Lerer recalls telling Dias, “Oh, this is it. They’re gonna end Roe.”

With the federal right to an abortion likely to be eliminated, the two hopped across the country and began reporting.

“That moment needed a serious journalistic [contribution],” Dias said, wary of the skewed partisan and opinion coverage that would come after the expected decision to overturn Roe. “We do independent journalism.”

People began asking them what would come of their project if the decision weren’t overturned. Brodesser-Akner told them she grew up always knowing this was the law, never questioning whether or not it could disappear.

But something in their gut was telling them everything was about to change.

“We could not believe the reporting we were getting,” Dias said. The book therefore became an intimate portrait of those affected by the Supreme Court case, and an exercise in “seeing that deeply human” element to the story.

“We’re really with the women that are making these choices,” Lerer said. “That’s how people relate to this. They see it through their own [stories].”

Lerer and Dias did not want to write a history textbook. They wanted to document a firsthand account of the post-Roe era, making the book read more like a novel than a strict timeline.

“It’s too important an issue to get lost in these dry facts and terms,” Dias said. “We took in a lot of people’s suffering.”

Abortion headlines are hard to follow, even if you follow the topic closely, Lerer said. Both sides of the conflict, she said, have used different misleading language to weaponize and confuse the public with their agenda.

“We don’t use pro-life in the book,” Lerer said, referring to abortion supporters as a part of the anti-abortion movement throughout the event. “[Abortion] language is so politicized.”

The language surrounding this topic can get incredibly complicated, she said. Even as the terms changed rapidly, she hoped to keep her words in the book as non-partisan as possible.

“People have continued to talk to me because they appreciate the fairness of the reporting,” Dias said. “[Abortion] is, really, at heart, a spiritual journey.”

Speaking to those of the anti-abortion movement, she said, they couldn’t separate their values of conservative Christianity from their values of womanhood, marriage and family.

Lerer had her third child just five days before she made the decision to write what would become The Fall of Roe.

“I think it made me really comfortable talking about the issue in really blunt terms,” she said. “Women have a diversity of opinions. It’s nuanced. It’s complicated for a lot of people. There’s shades of gray.”

Going into the last month before the fall of Roe v. Wade, the two were in a “mad rush” to be inside an anti-abortion pregnancy center the moment the decision was made. Their chance occurrence in Ohio was pure luck, they said.

“This often happens in history,” Dias said. “[We] get to this critical mass of ‘this is happening’...It became this tidal wave.”

The book launch featured a Q&A, where the co-authors took questions from the audience. One of those questions was from a high school student asking how to get her AP Seminar report on abortion out to officials in her home state of Florida. Lerer and Dias recommended she hop into local journalism.

“This could easily be a 50-year story,” Lerer said. “[Abortion] has had a huge impact on the politics. It’s hard for me to find another issue that scrambled American politics...almost overnight.”

Dias said she still thinks about the woman she spoke to, who was battling loneliness, hardship and abuse and as she underwent her procedure on the last legal day she could in South Dakota.

“There’s not one societal solution to this,” Dias said. “Our job as journalists is to kind of just say what we see.”