After Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, I found guidance in a listicle headlined “Ten Tips for Reporting in an Autocracy,” by Sheila Coronel, who covered the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines and now directs the Columbia Journalism School’s Center for Investigative Journalism. I often think of one rule in particular:
“6) Do not look away from atrocity.”
Easier said than done. But in “Killers of Roe: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights,” Amy Littlefield’s deeply informed reporting mixed with witty observations that elicit chuckles kept me so absorbed that I lost track of time while reading about the demise of the constitutional right to abortion and the rise of Trump.
To “escape from the grim reality” of her task, Littlefield—abortion access correspondent for The Nation—positions herself as a feminist detective in one of the classic Agatha Christie murder mysteries she reads for escapism. The “comfort of this familiar paradigm” yields a page-turner of a book with sections named after women who died from illegal abortions.
“I could trace the trail of bloody footprints that got us here,” Littlefield begins, “right back to the Hyde Amendment,” which passed three years after the Supreme Court legalized abortion nationwide, and banned federal funding for most abortions under Medicaid.
For the past 50 years, Congress has voted to renew the Hyde Amendment with the annual appropriations bill, “forcing poor people to stay pregnant if they cannot afford an abortion, or in many cases, die from complications of a botched back-alley procedure.” Ultimately, Littlefield sees it as “the key to understanding the anti-abortion movement’s gradual destruction, and eventual reversal, of Roe v. Wade.”
Among the suspects she interviews is Paul Haring, who drafted the bill voted into law under Congressman Henry Hyde’s name. She describes how they helped launch a “decades-long alliance between politicians and true believers” who saw themselves at the forefront of a “civil rights movement for fetuses.” Another suspect is the late Senator and notorious racist and homophobe, Jesse Helms, who introduced the ban on USAID funding from being used for abortions, and was so proto-Trumpian “he was even said to have small hands,” she notes.
Littlefield finds a surprise as she goes down the list of possible killers, and visits the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi, California, to study how he solidified the anti-abortion movement’s alliance with the Republican Party. When she tells a volunteer docent about her book, the woman concurs in a whispered tone that if abortion “becomes illegal, it’s still going to happen… people are going to die.” When Littlefield tells the docent Reagan supported a constitutional ban on abortion, she seems willing to overlook this since he failed. Littlefield notes a similar logic led to Trump’s re-election, showing how “even people who care about keeping abortion legal don’t care enough to change their loyalty to a man they love.”
The book’s mystery novel construct also works to engage readers who may be sympathetic to or even participants in the movement to protect reproductive rights, and gently guides them through a review of its missteps. Littlefield notes she has to examine even the unlikely suspects, such as a “hero in the story,” like Faye Wattleton, who made restoring abortion access under Medicaid a top goal when she became the first Black woman to lead Planned Parenthood and then faced board members with other priorities in the early days of the non-profit industrial complex.
The “mysterious death of abortion rights” in the book’s subtitle may refer to how the majority of Americans have long supported legal abortion. After many cuts to Roe, the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling in 2022 was the fatal blow. Now 21 states have abortion bans or early gestational limits. So how did the killers get away with it? “Patriarchy had been like the Hamburglar, lurking around every corner in my investigation,” Littlefield notes at one point. But she goes deeper, since a “murder mystery at its heart is about revealing the complexity of human nature.”
Another likely suspect she has reported on for years is the Catholic Church, whose bishops forbid abortions unless the life of the mother is in danger. This has resulted in agonizing deaths and suffering even for relatively common first trimester miscarriages at hospitals run by the church, which account for one in six acute-care beds in the United States. Other suspects she talks to include the militant Randall Terry who led the antiabortion “rescue movement”—and contemporary activists who are “keepers of the flame”—whose “willingness to act like abortion was murder lent credibility and urgency to the rest of the cause.”
As she considers every possible angle, Littlefield has a revelation on the night of the 2024 election. First, she watches the race get called for Trump at a party in Amarillo, TX, hosted by an ardent antiabortion activist who had worried earlier to her that Trump’s vow to veto a nationwide abortion ban “could hurt his chances at winning.” Then, she heads to a local bar where pro-choice advocates were celebrating their efforts to defeat an abortion travel ban ordinance that would have declared any person or group a criminal if they help someone pass through the city to get an out-of-state abortion, and potentially reward those who report them with a $10,000 bounty. The way forward may be “tiny, limited, local” organizing, she concludes.
In some ways, Littlefield’s murder mystery has yet to end. Trump and his MAGA supporters are trying to hold onto power with ever more hostility to women and pregnant people. Her clear-eyed look at how we got here offers useful insights for how to restore access to safe and legal abortion.
Renée Feltz is a longtime independent journalist formerly with Democracy Now!
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