KILLERS OF ROE

Channeling Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, a journalist explores who killed Roe v. Wade. In a departure from most detective novels, the killers seem ready to talk.

The setting: the years following Roe (1973). The suspects: conservatives looking out for the “taxpayers” and ensuring their own chances of getting into heaven. There are activists, too, who intimidate and are violent toward patients and abortion providers, and those who keep the massive anti-abortion movement running. It’s a mix of true believers, writes Littlefield, and they believe in a Catholic or evangelical Christian God and American notions of individual responsibility and choice. Despite the undercurrent of patriarchy, Littlefield makes every effort to find humanity in her interviewees, though she does not let them off the hook for their roles in the deaths of their victims. Two recurring figures represent the many women who suffered due to late-20th-century anti-abortion policies. The first is Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old mother who found herself without access to safe care when the 1976 Hyde Amendment cut Medicaid funding for abortions. The second is Becky Bell, a teenager who needed an abortion but couldn’t bear to tell her parents. Both died after unsafe procedures. Laws that restricted federal funding and required parental consent became the “law of the land,” accepted by leaders in the abortion rights movement and Democrats in Congress as perennial compromises. The existing tenuousness of abortion rights has been further exacerbated by state and local laws criminalizing abortion after Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe. This deep investigation reveals the nuances of anti-abortion politics and strategy. It also reveals that the fight for abortion rights isn’t over.

An unresolved “murder mystery” doubles as a call to action.