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Amy Littlefield, "Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights" (Legacy Lit, 2026)
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- [00:01]
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- [00:24]
Amy Littlefield
I have created the most advanced AI soldier.
- [00:28]
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Amy Littlefield
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- [00:44]
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Amy Littlefield
There's no going back. Our directive is clear. Hang on.
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- [00:55]
Amy Littlefield
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:00]
Rebecca Buchanan
Hi, this is Rebecca Buchanan, host of New Books Network. And today I am here with Amy Littlefield to talk about her new book, Killers of My investigation into the Mysterious death of Abortion Rights. Amy, thanks for being here with me today.
- [01:13]
Amy Littlefield
Thank you so much for speaking with me.
- [01:15]
Rebecca Buchanan
Rebecca, could you talk a little bit about how this book came to be, kind of what the synopsis is and why you decided to write it?
- [01:23]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah. So I have covered abortion rights for more than 10 years for the Nation and New York Times opinion reveal other outlets. This has been my beat for a long time, both before the Supreme Court overturned the nationwide constitutional right to abortion and after. And I was in the fog of new motherhood when Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. And I realized in that moment that the sort of slow erosion of abortion rights that I'd been tracking as a reporter for many years was now going to culminate in the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the end of the constitutional right to abortion. And so I set about trying to figure out how to tell the story of the death of abortion rights, which had been going on for years before that Supreme Court decision and has continued, of course, to shift and change afterwards. And I was really interested in the behind the scenes figures, the people who even after, you know, many years reporting on abortion rights, I'd never heard of.
- [02:26]
Rebecca Buchanan
Right.
- [02:27]
Amy Littlefield
And I was also, because I was in this like, new mom fog when all of this was happening, I felt so, so angry. And I was nursing my baby in the middle of the night and feeling like, so, you know, angry at what was coming. And the thing that I was reading for comfort were murder mysteries. And so, and that had been like my, like, little haven of comfort, especially Agatha Christie from the time when I was like 13 years old, you Know, in an awkward, you know, pubescent teenager, that's, that's what I would use to cope. And it became the same for me, you know, postpartum. And so I started to think about a murder mystery, about telling this as a, as a real life whodunit, sort of initially as a way to like entice myself to tell a pretty unpleasant history.
- [03:09]
Rebecca Buchanan
Right.
- [03:09]
Amy Littlefield
I mean, like this sort of Cliff Notes version of the history of the erosion of abortion rights is that this is like many decades of women dying preventable, sometimes horrible deaths at the behest of policies advanced by white men, many of whom believe they have a direct line to God himself. Okay. So it's. It can be really hard to stomach. And so it started as a way to sort of entice myself to tell the story. And as I got more into it, I really liked the whodunit paradigm because in a murder mystery, the sort of. The best part of it is always that it's the people you least suspect who committed the crime. And so as I went through the book, I was looking at each sort of section tells the story of the death of a woman from anti abortion policies and then looks at the behind the scene figures who were implicated in that death. And I was looking for people who you might not suspect. Right. The equivalent of the quiet housekeeper in a murder mystery. And so I found those folks, you know, the retired IRS tax attorney who'd written one of America's most long standing and impactful anti abortion policies, the, you know, disgraced ex congressman whose name has been lost from the history books, who, who put the Representative Henry Hyde up to introducing the ban on federal funding of abortion that endures to this day. So I sort of started tracing these behind the scenes fig. Behind the scenes figures. And I think one of the sort of subtexts of the book is that, you know, the quiet housekeepers, the behind the scenes figures on both sides of the equation were these really important silent drivers of change on both sides of the struggle for abortion rights.
- [04:50]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, I will say, I mean, in my another room I have, you know, shelves and shelves of Agatha Christie. So your Ms. Marple collection, it made me so, so happy.
- [05:00]
Amy Littlefield
That makes me. That's great.
- [05:02]
Rebecca Buchanan
I mean, I really love like, you know, she will be sitting there knitting. She will have those, I'll have those conversations. So I really love that tie in with her and thinking through this in this sort of deeper context because like you said, these are things where you think you kind of know the narrative to how we got to where we were today. But you don't.
- [05:24]
Amy Littlefield
Yes, yes. I thought I knew. You know, I had spent a long time studying this, and I was really surprised by a lot of the people I found and by the complexities of their motives, the complexities of their actions on both sides. Right. I mean, there were really complicated people on the pro choice side as well that I was finding. I assume we're going to talk about Ms. Marple for the rest of the podcast.
- [05:45]
Rebecca Buchanan
I think we should. I really think we should. That could be it.
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Amy Littlefield
Yeah.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Because one of the things before we kind of get in, you broke this up, like you said, into sort of five different parts. But can you talk a little bit about just the process of doing this work and this research? Because you also, you talk to people who, you know, and we get a glimpse of you kind of going like, why the hell am I here? Or why is this person even talking to me? So can you talk a little bit about that process itself for doing this work and putting this book together?
- [06:17]
Amy Littlefield
Right. Thank you for asking that. So, I mean, just to justify the Ms. Marble paradigm for a minute. So Ms. Marble, for those unfamiliar, right, is Agatha Christie's, in my opinion, best detective. Right. She's an old lady. She solves mysteries by drawing parallels to people in her home village of St. Mary Mead. So she'll figure out that someone was the culprit because they remind her of, like, so and so who, you know, poisoned the village doctor with cough syrup or, you know, whatever the like. Interesting parallel is that she manages to draw, and her specialty is human nature. So she listens really de. Sometimes to really unpleasant or even evil people. And she makes a prognosis based on, you know, their. Their human nature, which she's able to glean. And the other key to Ms. Marple's success is that she is unassuming, right? She's an old white lady who sits there knitting by the fire, and anyone will just open up and trust her. And, you know, I started to feel that way sometimes. I go to a lot of right wing conferences as a reporter. I spend a lot of time in conservative spaces talking to conservative people, to people who are advancing anti trans policies, advancing anti abortion bills, to people who have a pretty different view of the world than I do. And I think because I'm white, because I'm married, because I'm a mom, because, you know, I've got a photo of a cute kid with a blonde, you know, hairdo on my phone screen, it. It creates this sort of, you know, trust that helps me in doing my reporting. And so that was the sort of resonance that I felt with the character of Miss Marple. And so I was doing a lot of deep listening for this book. I was listening and really trying to deeply understand and not make assumptions. I think I, as someone who is openly supportive of abortion rights, right. I tend to write for more progressive publications and I don't try to hide that when I speak with these sources, you know, I, I come to them and say, look, you, you know, you know where I stand on this for my body of work. And yet I want to understand you. I write nuanced profiles, I want to understand you, I want to listen to you. And so it was really coming to people with wanting to understand their human nature, understand their motives, understand, you know, in a murder mystery, it's means, motives and opportunity. Right? And I wanted to understand all of those things on a deep and serious level. And that required often spending many hours with these sources, listening to them talk to me. You know, one of them, the person I spent the most time with was this man in his 80s who had written an early version of this anti abortion policy called the Hyde Amendment that endures to this day. And he would, you know, assign me reading, right. I read the Gospel of Life. I read passages of the Bible that he thought I should read. I was really trying to understand what the world looked like from his perspective. And, you know, that allowed me sort of access into deeper, a deeper understanding of his motives. Right. I think oftentimes pro choice activists tend to dismiss anti abortion strategists as they hate women and they want to control women, and that's all there is to it. And I don't want to dismiss. Right. I think that control is a huge part of what's going on here with the anti abortion movement's wider project. But I think there were a lot of really interesting motives going on that I hadn't expected. And I was able to uncover those by spending many hours listening to these folks and hearing their life stories.
- [09:52]
Rebecca Buchanan
So you go through, like I said, you separate this into five parts. And the first part, the first couple chapters, you try to go back to the beginning kind of thing. But Rosie Jimenez plays this large role throughout this. So I'm wondering if you can kind of talk about her, kind of why she grounds this and what you wanted to do in that first part of your book. The first couple chapters.
- [10:18]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah, yeah. So Rosie Jimenez was a 27 year old Mexican American woman. She lived in McAllen, Texas, close to the border with Mexico. She had a four Year old daughter. She was working very hard, trying to put herself through college, studying to be a special education teacher. She'd been raised in poverty, you know, in a big family of migrant farm workers. She, you know, was really trying to sort of build a better life for her daughter. And she got pregnant when her fiance was in jail from, by, by a man who wasn't her fiance. She needed to end her pregnancy. And unfortunately for her, the federal ban on funding, federal funding of abortion known as the Hyde Amendment, had recently passed. Texas had in response, cut off Medicaid funding of abortion. And so Rosie, who had been able to get an abortion funded under Texas Medicaid before now, had to fight now, found that, that her Medicaid card was no longer going to cover an abortion. And so she went to an unsafe provider, to a lay midwife who inserted a tube into her cervix. She contracted a terrible infection and died in agony eight days later in a hospital. And, you know, while people were badgering her to talk about the abortion and while she was pleading to just be left alone, to die in peace and left her daughter without a mom. Incredibly tragic story. And as I examined this story many decades later, the questions I had were around who was responsible for the policy that resulted in Rosa Jimenez's death, of course, and who besides Henry Hyde? Right. Who's the congressman whose name has long been attached to it? Sort of a notorious conservative figure who were the behind the scenes figures there. And I was able to find and interview some of those folks. And then another question I had was why her death wasn't enough to stop the policy that killed her. And why, in fact, that policy endures to this day and is still supported and was long supported by people on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, it's been renewed by every single Congress, whether Republican or Democratic controlled. It's become this sort of common ground policy in the abortion rights struggle because it sort of became conventional wisdom that of course, taxpayer funding wouldn't go towards abortions. Right. And so I'm trying to unpack how it was that this woman's death didn't stop that policy in its tracks. And part of the responsibility for that lies with the pro choice movement. And I dug into archival material, I went into the records of pro choice groups and found these moments, these sort of turning points when it looked like pro choice leaders had sort of made a conscious decision to turn away from the Hyde amendment and to focus on the incoming attacks from the Reagan administration, which of course comes to power in the 1980s. And to sort of triage the many challenges, political challenges that were coming their way. And so I dig into, you know, the, the pro choice responsibility, I call it the second death of Rosie Jimenez. Right. The fact that her death didn't stop the policy that killed her. And of course, part of that had to do with the fact that she's an unmarried Latina. Part of that had to do with the fact that she had an abortion. And women who have abortions are always stigmatized. Then part of it had to do with the political strength of the anti abortion movement and their savviness in coming up with a policy that targeted low income women in particular, many of whom are women of color and sort of the, the white led pro choice movement's inability to, to respond to that in a robust and meaningful way.
- [14:08]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah. One thing that comes up time and time again with the Hyde amendment and throughout this is this idea that we can't save rich babies because if you're too rich, you can go and get an abortion anyway. But we can save like the poor babies, we can save, you know, the black babies. These, these really kind of problematic racist ideas, like couched in this belief that what they're doing is actually anti racist. Right. Actually like non eugenics, even though what they, what it is is really problematic. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like that use of the rhetoric that is used around keeping this amendment and trying to save babies?
- [14:51]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I mean, there's this language around the taxpayer, right. And the taxpayer has always been coded as like, that's white Christian men and the things that they do and do not want to pay for. Right. And so this idea of taxpayer funding of abortion was always about what, you know, and, and that's how you can sort of understand the, the way that these anti abortion strategists made the Hyde amendment sound palatable and appealing and like a middle ground. Right. Because they were, they were protecting taxpayers, you know, and who doesn't want, you know, their tax pay, you know, their taxes to be protected. And so that was this sort of red herring, this code word that kept coming up in my investigation of all this history. The other thing that I really want people to understand about the anti abortion movement and how their strategy was so successful is that they copied the civil rights movement's playbook. Right. I think we need to understand the anti abortion movement as part of a backlash not only to the feminist movement. Right. And to Roe v. Wade and second wave feminism, but also to the civil rights movement. The historian Jennifer Holland talks about the anti abortion movement as building a civil rights movement for fetuses. Right. And what really became a civil rights movement for white people because in the 60s and 70s when this movement was starting to coalesce, you had the civil rights movement demanding that people reckon with white supremacy. This was very challenging for white conservatives who didn't want to look at white supremacy. And so the anti abortion movement sort of offered them this escape valve where they could join an alternative civil rights movement that used the same rhetoric that said they were saving black babies. We're saving babies. We're saving. What could be more innocent than this tiny little baby? It's the perfect victim. You know, forget about all those victims of police brutality or, you know, lynching or, you know, we're, we're saving babies. And so it, it sort of invited white conservatives to join this civil rights movement of their own, purported civil rights movement of their own, instead of, you know, grappling with the racial issues that were being brought to the forefront by the civil rights movement. And so there's a lot of rhetoric around, you know, pro choice advocates being supposedly eugenicists. Now, footnote, Some of that is accurate, right? Like, you know, eugenics was a big part of US history on all sides of the aisle. And yes, you know, pro choice people who are involved in sort of the foundations of, of abortion access and birth control access in this country did indeed, you know, use eugenicist arguments. That's, that's not untrue. However, I think we really see this sort of strategic use of that history by a movement that's attempting to infringe upon the rights of women by invoking and co opting the language of the civil rights movement in a way that of course ultimately hurts people of color and low income people the most. Right. Because those were the folks whose abortion rights they were able to take away.
- [18:00]
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- [18:30]
Rebecca Buchanan
You know, another thing that I thought was so interesting was the use of kind of the the or the. I don't know if it's the co option or the fight the mailer to get people to support and give money to these sort of smaller organizations, right? This invention that, like, I grew up, you know, I'm a little older than you. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, right, remembering, like, those coming in the mail and this idea, like. And even making, right, like the quote, unquote, fake news, like making up stories to get people on board. And started with the left, but then it worked really well with the right. Can you talk a little bit about that, too, and what you found with that?
- [19:10]
Amy Littlefield
Yes, I love. I'm so glad you asked about that because I love digging into this, like, chapter in history, which I think is gonna blow especially young people's minds, right? So there was this hot new technology in the 1970s that was super controversial. Like, so controversial that they had, like, hearings about it, right? It was like the way that they're talking to Mark Zuckerberg today, right? It's. It was like, we have to call these guys on the carpet. What are they doing? What is this strange new technology? And that technology was sending mail to people's home, asking them for money, right? Direct mail. And these were the leaflets that you get today. And probably, if you're like me, I don't know if I should admit this, but you put them right in your recycling bin. Most people don't open them today. But back then, this was this hot new technology of direct mail. And so I interviewed the masterminds of this technology on both sides. So the conservative mastermind of this technology, Richard Vigori, who's one of the architects of the conservative movement. And then on the progressive side, Roger Craver, who was coming up with ways to help pro choice groups, help feminist groups, help environmental groups and civil rights groups to raise money by sending mail to people's homes, asking them for donations, right? And it was wildly successful. And sort of what they figured out is that you don't need everybody to respond. You need a tiny subset of people to respond and then really care about your cause and keep responding and keep responding over time, right? And those sort of become. Become your members and your backbone. And this was a radical idea because back then, most of the, you know, philanthropy was massive, you know, wealth coming from a handful of sources. And this was sort of democratizing funding and saying, this is. We're going to be funded by small donations from regular people. You know, that was a radical idea at the time. And Roger Craver was the one who was really figuring this out on the progressive side. And so I went through all these mailings that had to do with the Hyde Amendment that We're saying, and one of them was like a fake news clip clipping that was like, abortion banned everywhere. You know, it said that on the front of the envelope, something like that. And then inside you learn, okay, that's not actually true. That hasn't happened. But it has for poor women and, you know, donate to save, you know, these women who have been victimized by the Hyde Amendment. And so this was complicated, right, because they're raising money off of this terrible policy and they're figuring out how to sort of build themselves up from a shoestring operation that they had been in the early years after Roe v. Wade into something much more robust that can begin to push back against the huge power of the anti abortion movement. They need money to do that, and yet they're also making political compromises that they need to make and figuring out how to demand what they can demand and what they're going to be able to get, what's realistic within the sort of political landscape that they're dealing with. And so Roger Craver emerged as a suspect in my investigation. How did this fundraising model help lead to what I call the second death of Rosie Jimenez? How do we end up in a place where the Hyde Amendment did not become this, like, bright battle line and where it had to sort of, you know, fall by the wayside? Yes, they were raising money off it. But then there were moments, there was this moment that felt like this smoking gun that I found in the archives where Roger Craver's fundraising firm is saying, hey, you know, maybe we need to sort of move on from this. Maybe we can't just deal with. With the issue as it relates to low income women. Maybe we need to be sort of looking more big picture and more long term here. And this sort of arrival of the nonprofit industrial complex, combined with the fact that they're raising money mostly from white women, right. Mostly from people who have disposable income. And that's mostly folks who are not going to be impacted directly by the Hyde Amendment. And so. And so even though it was this radical idea of democratizing funding, it also, you know, was responding to the. To a donor class of a different kind. Right? To small donors and their needs and wishes and their kind of desire to feel like they were saving poor women, but also their limited attention spans. Right. The Hyde Amendment was maybe not going to hold their attention for too long. Right. Attention spans even back then were short. You know, imagine that. And so it was really complicated to dig into to think about sort of how this early fundraising model was a boon for nonprofits, but also sort of could be a different type of conservatizing. Is that a word? A force that could sort of push them in a more moderating direction in a way that we're used to thinking about happening as a result of foundations. So, again, like, Roger Craver was this super complicated figure that emerged. He was really this stalwart progressive with this incredible history and real commitment to civil rights and feminism. And yet everyone I found along the way had made compromises and. And been strategic and been opportunistic when they needed to be right.
- [24:34]
Rebecca Buchanan
And they. And also, like, with this, there was some point, I think it was sort of later in the book, it might have been, you know, which. I don't remember which part, but like. Like even some of these men talking about hire somebody, talking about hiring women to go through and find addresses for them, like going through the phone book. So. Right. So there's this. Throughout this, we also see the. The labor of women. Right. The emotional labor. And also, like the ways in which women have been used in this with. Sometimes without their knowledge or permission, or often without their knowledge and permission. Maybe I should say.
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Amy Littlefield
Yes. I love that story. So this was Richard Vigory, who was the.
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Rebecca Buchanan
The.
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Amy Littlefield
Roger Craver's counterpart on the. On the. On the bad side, on the conservative side of the equation. And he was raising money, you know, while Craver was doing this for progressive groups, Figurine was. Was building the conservative movement basically using the same model. And what's fascinating about the two of them is they were in, like, constant communication with each other and developed this kind of weird friendship, even though they were basically undoing each other' and continues to do so to this day. So Vigory was so successful with raising money through direct mail. Right. Which is really an art. You have to find a pitch that's going to make someone who's just come home from a long day at work open up that mail, read it, sit down and write a check. That's pretty tough. And he was so good at it that there was a rumor in conservative circles that he had a spigot in his office that gold coins would flow out of the. Right. And so he was figuring out how he could build these. These conservative groups by raising money for them through the mail. And one of the ways. Right. So they. So he and Kramer both have this problem where they were like, we need a bunch of addresses to make this work.
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Rebecca Buchanan
Right.
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Amy Littlefield
That didn't. There weren't, like, donor databases back then that they could just, you know, Copy. And so he sent, he hired Kelly girls, he hired these women to go down to copy the names and addresses of Goldwater donors, of Barry Goldwater donors, right, this conservative icon. And he used those addresses to basically build a database of conservative voters who he could, you know, write to and say, hey, wouldn't you like to donate to these, you know, early iterations of anti abortion groups or conservative groups? And, and yeah, so I don't know, I kind of like dazed off as I was listening to him talk about this, thinking about these women who were like, probably just trying to make some money, you know, and make ends meet. And instead they've been recruited into this like, massively significant conservative project that's going to be used to build, you know, bulwarks of, of right wing power and fundraising for generations to come. But yeah, I wonder if they're out there somewhere.
- [27:33]
Rebecca Buchanan
Just I wanted to, I was wondering the same. I'm like, you're so great to be able to find these women who like, did they know what they were doing?
- [27:41]
Amy Littlefield
Right. Yeah.
- [27:43]
Rebecca Buchanan
So we got this stuff going on in this, you know, the 70s, but then you move into like, sort of the late 80s, early 90s. You use Becky Bell. Like, this is the time when I was like, she and I were the same, right around the same age. I remember so vividly all of the strong protest bombing, that movement of the early and mid-90s. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like, Becky Bell, what started happening then with people saving fetuses and like crazy, like to me that's just. Yeah, the crazy, the crazy shit that was going on at that point in this movement.
- [28:24]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah, the true believer stuff, right? The true believer stuff is what I, how I think, think of it. It's. Yeah, it gets pretty gnarly. So, I mean, so to start with Becky Bell, right, She's a teenage girl living in Indiana. She's in some ways the perfect victim. If this was not an abortion story, she would have been the perfect victim. She's white, she's blonde, she's very pretty. She gets pregnant, she doesn't want to tell her parents. Her parents are this sort of like beautiful, you know, bread and butter Midwestern couple in this typical family. They had been, I think, homecoming king and queen in the same high school. And she told a friend, I love my mom and dad too much. I can't disappoint them. I don't want to tell them that I need an abortion. The problem was, you know, this is the era of proliferation of incremental Restrictions on abortion. Right. So where the anti abortion movement realizes it's not going to overturn Roe v. Wade in one fell swoop. And so what they're going to do is advance legislation mostly in states that's going to chip away and make it harder to access. Right. So the Hyde Amendment is the first major victory taking away access for a lot low income people who are on Medicaid. And then we see this encroachment of parental consent and notification laws, laws requiring parental involvement, which are popular, including among liberals. Right. This is a very popular idea that your daughter should have to come to you and tell you if she's going to get an abortion. This is another one of these policies that winds up finding support among Democrats and Republicans alike with this idea of the sort of mythical middle ground on abortion. And so because there is such a law in Becky Bell's home state of Indiana, she needs parental consent. She, she doesn't want to ask for it and you know, disappoint her parents. And so she seeks an unsafe abortion. She contracts an infection, dies, you know, another terrible preventable death from pneumonia as a result of this infection that she's contracted. Her parents find out after the fact from the corner that the cause of her death is, is an unsafe abortion. And at first they're inclined to just go underground to just not talk about it, to just, you know, keep the secret that their daughter kept. And then they decide to talk about it and they decide to, you know, speak out about parental consent laws. And in this very unlikely way, this couple winds out being this sort of, you know, going on, on media outlets and, and traveling around the country speaking out against these laws even as they're, you know, finding a foothold within middle America. And so, you know, her death is the one that I unpack. And I found again another one of these unlikely suspects. This former state lawmaker who's still alive, who's in his 90s, who I found, you know, sitting in his home in Kokomo, Indiana, who told me about his role in the anti abortion policy that contributed to Becky Bell's death death. Incredibly, he'd written a book called no Regrets. So I had this memoir of his that I could read. But of course, the 1980s, the backdrop of Becky Bell's death is not just incremental anti abortion restrictions. It's the Reagan era and sort of the era of cementing the alliance between Republicans and the anti abortion movement who are going to refer to Ronald Reagan as the first pro life president, even though when he was in office. They had plenty of frustration, frustrations with him. He did do quite a bit to advance their cause. And so the 1980s, the Reagan era, was sort of really this moment where the, you know, abortion hadn't really been a strictly partisan issue. Right. There are a lot of Catholic Democrats who were anti abortion back in the day. There were a lot. There were plenty of pro choice Republicans. One who I interviewed is Oregon Senator Bob Packwood, another very complicated guy,
- [32:26]
Rebecca Buchanan
and
- [32:26]
Amy Littlefield
put a champion of abortion rights, even though, you know, he got sort of, he, he was one of the most prolific you know, alleged sexual harassers of women that we've ever seen in American political history. And so, so the 1980s were really sort of the Reagan era. And my favorite, one of my favorite chapters is details. My, my trip to the Reagan library, right, where I encountered this, this docent who was volunteering there, who was like, staunchly pro choice. And that became another, like, little side mystery for me to solve is like, how does someone who volunteers her time at the Reagan library, you know, how does that person have pro choice beliefs? And what does that tell us about our political system, political history in ways that I think have resonance for the 2024 election and for where we are today? So that, so, you know, you asked about the sort of the, the fetus keepers and the rescue movement that's sort of in the next section. But, but yeah, the 1980s were, were the era of, of Reagan and trying to contend with the incremental restrictions again, proliferating, supported by both sides of the aisle and examining how the death of Becky Bell wasn't enough to stop the policy that killed her. And one of the more beautiful interview they did was with Becky's niece Addie, who came and testified against Indiana's total abortion ban that they were passing in the wake of the Dobbs decision and has sort of taken up the mantle of her family's fight to stop incremental restrictions from killing anyone else.
- [34:18]
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- [34:19]
Amy Littlefield
Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe. Oh, sorry.
- [34:36]
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- [36:18]
Rebecca Buchanan
Yeah, and throughout this one thing we also see, and one thing you talk about is the role that the political, the politicians, especially the politicians of the left, play in keeping Hyde going. Right? I mean, because you talk often about how they get on the campaign trail. They talk about pulling Obama right, talks about getting rid of it and then using it as this negotiating tool. And the leaders in nar, all the leaders in NOW do not Planned Parenthood don't have the power to stop it. So can you talk a little bit about that before we get to kind of talking about what's going on now too? Like that role of the Political left in using it as a tool or keeping it in play as this tool to get other policies passed.
- [37:10]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is, this is part of this really complicated history, right. Like there are no pure heroes in this story. Right. There's no one who could, who you could look at and say, wow, you really never made a compromise or a complicated decision or a trade off here. You, you know, because, you know, I, I had always thought of the anti abortion movement success as an alliance between true believers and opportunists. Have presidents who change their position on the issue, including our current one, you know, as the wind blows, as they think it might be expedient for them. And then you have true believers, the people who are literally storing fetal remains in their closet, you know, in, in some cases. And, and those are the folks who are sort of the driving force who, who create the political opportunities for, you know, politicians to take. And I found those folks on, on both sides, you know, true believers who were making political trade offs. And the Hyde Amendment was sort of this Rosetta stone for understanding how all of that happened throughout history. Right. So in the 1970s, I think pro choice groups, which were really in their sort of shoestring form.
- [38:23]
Rebecca Buchanan
Right.
- [38:23]
Amy Littlefield
These were not well funded operations yet. Right. Roger Craver hadn't totally gotten the formula. Right. They weren't, they weren't, you know, the massive non profits that they, they look like today. In the beginning, they really did fight the Hyde Amendment. Right. I found all these memos where Carol Werner, who was the lobbyist for naral, she turned down a job with the federal government to sort of put in her time for the women's movement. And she's sitting there with her typewriter being like, please pay attention, we have to stop this. If this ban pass, it's going to be so bad, we have to stop it. And you know, and the Catholic bishops on the other side were just flooding, you know, Congressman, Congressman Dan Flood. They were flooding, Flood with all of these missives, you know, from Catholic leaders. And he is a Democrat who ended up flipping his position crucially and helping to allow the Hyde Amendment to pass initially. And so I think there was this fight actually against the Hyde Amendment when it was first passing. And then what starts to happen. And this would become the sort of predominant pro choice strategy for decades, right up until it failed with the Dobbs decision. They began to count on the idea that they could defeat this policy in court. And so there was this idea that, you know, that they, we would have a strong case if we oppose this in court. So we shouldn't accept any compromises on it. Instead, we'll fight it and we'll win. And that strategy fails. In 1980, the Supreme Court upholds the Hyde Amendment. And then at the same time, of course, that year, you have the, this administration that's quite hostile to abortion rights that's coming in. It's this sort of triumph movement for, you know, the anti abortion movement sort of electing their first major figurehead. And so the 1980s were really running defense after this, you know, court strategy that they had been counting on to, to get rid of the Hyde Amendment had failed them. And so, you know, there's a meeting that I explore, the meeting minutes from this meeting of pro choice leaders where they basically said, you know, we've got Ronald Reagan coming in. The Hyde amendment's just been upheld in court. And they were like, we, we've got the threat of a nationwide abortion ban looming now. Like, we've gotta, you know, run triage here. And you know, there were moments where the fight against the Hyde Amendment did come to a head again. And I do want to say, I think black women and abortion funds, right? These are grassroots groups, groups that fund abortions when, when Medicaid wouldn't pay for it. And then, you know, black women who are representing the people who were disproportionately hurt by the Hyde Amendment, they were constantly, throughout history saying, we need to overturn this policy, look at the harms that it's causing because they were close to those harms and they were seeing them in a way that people in Washington were not. In the 19, early 1990s under Clinton, there's another sort of moment where the Hyde Amendment comes to the forefront again. There's a campaign led by black women to finally repeal it, and there's a Democratic led Congress and a Democrat in the White House. And it seems like it might happen. Henry Hyde is still there defending his ban using the same sort of we're saving black babies, you know, language. And Congress fails to repeal it in that moment. Right. And that's not something you can blame entirely on Republicans. Right. Because look who was getting control of Congress. And, and that's also an interesting moment of tension between mainstream, often white led pro choice groups and black women and sort of more radical progressives who are allied with black women, who are, they were sort of mired in this debate about how to protect abortion rights at the time, whether they should just enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade under something called the Freedom of Choice act. Or whether they should would try to repeal the Hyde Amendment and try to repeal parental consent laws using that same legislation. And there was a divide over that, you know, that, that some people to this day will blame for the fact that, that they didn't shore up Roe v. Wade in that moment. And so, you know, these are the sort of tensions and trade offs that are. Are part of this history as people, you know, who, who I think really did believe in what they were doing in many cases looked for political opportunities and made political comp. As they went along.
- [42:47]
Rebecca Buchanan
So we're at this moment now where Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade has been overturned, right. It's been pulled back. But one of the things you kind of end with this idea or what's going on with this. I'd love for you to talk about one Donaldson, is that his name, who's like going around, like has been going around and getting towns, right, and getting like sort of small communities to ban abortions in their town and using kind of these loopholes. So it's this really fascinatingly scary grassroots effort, right, to make this happen. So we have our national thing, but we also have things going on at even, not even at the state level, at the, you know, city level. Can you talk a little bit about that and, and what is like. Yeah, what's going on right now with this?
- [43:34]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah, absolutely. So, and just to sort of. Because you had asked about the rescue movement earlier, I just want to quickly mention, mention them in the true believer category. Right. So. So just to fast forward quickly through the 1990s and late 1980s, right, when you have true believers blockading, you know, abortion clinics, getting arrested in droves, right. And sort of the way that, that carries through, I think, to today, the people who are, who are continuing that mantle. There is a sort of modern day iteration of the rescue movement. And that's, you know, Monica Maglarino Miller, who I interviewed, and Will Goodman. These are folks who are frequently getting arrested to this day for, you know, interfering outside abortion clinics. Monica is the one that I obliquely mentioned earlier who kept, you know, fetal remains in her closet that she would recover from, you know, waste storage and preserve and photograph. And that's where a lot of the posters and images that you see out there of fetus has come from. And I would put Mark Lee Dixon in the same category of the sort of the true believers, the people who live and breathe this work. Mark is someone who has very little social life. He basically lives on the road. He travels around from town to town and he's advancing these policies called sanctuary cities for the unborn. What's most significant about these policies is that he teamed up with this anti abortion attorney named Jonathan Mitchell. They came up with this idea that they could ban abortion even while Roe v. Wade was still in effect by allowing private citizens to sue anyone who aided and abetted someone getting an abortion. And that policy was passed first at the municipal level and when it could sort of prove that it would stand in court because it made this sort of end run around Roe v. Wade by, you know, recruiting private citizens to do the work rather than state officials. They used that to ban abortion at six weeks in Texas. And that happened, you know, months before Roe v. Wade fell and was sort of the warning call for the constitutional right to abortion overall. Mark is still out there. He is now traveling around trying to contend with the fact that abortion bans, while they have wreaked havoc on people's lives, made getting an abortion much more complicated, they have really failed to stop abortions. Right. Abortions have increased each year since Dobbs, which is pretty remarkable because, you know, true believers on the pro choice side have set up shield laws which allow providers to ship abortion pills from blue states into red states. Activists like Mark Lee Dixon are very frustrated with this. Right. They succeeded in this monumental victory of overturning Roe v. Wade, and it has. Has led to an increase in abortions instead of a decrease. And there's really only extremely draconian solutions left. When you have a situation where people are ordering pills through the mail or handing them to one another. Right. It's very hard to stop that unless you get pretty, pretty, you know, George Orwell, 1984, kind of style. And so what marks, you know, the effort that I was documenting in the book was his effort in Amarillo, Texas, this to pass what he was calling an abortion trafficking ordinance. And this was basically a city measure that would try to stop people from traveling through Amarillo or out of Amarillo to a place where abortion was legal in order to try to stop the flow of people out of the state who are getting abortions. I mean, this is, again, like, you can't. How are you going to stop someone from driving a car? You know, how are you going to stop someone, an Uber driver, from picking up someone and driving them out of state? How are you going stop someone from ordering pills on the Internet? It's very hard. And so it gets pretty dystopian pretty fast. And that's what Mark was trying to do. And what was remarkable is on election day, right I spent election day 2024 in Amarillo, Texas with Mark and his friends. That's where I was when it became clear Trump was going to win re election. And Trump did win. And yet something fascinating happened in Amarillo, Texas, which was that Mark's ordinance to stop the availability of abortion in Amarillo, Texas failed and the abortion rights advocates who had been fighting him there succeeded. And so that was really fascinating to sort of contrast the way that abortion was being preserved at the local level. And yet we had this massive Republican victory, of course, at the national level.
- [48:28]
Rebecca Buchanan
So I have to ask, you've written this book, we're in 2026. We've, you know, what are your kind of, I'm not going to ask what your hopes for about what's going to happen, you know, and the next, you know, coming years about abortion, abortion rights. But what are you hoping people will get from this book? Like, what do you hope at this time and writing it and putting it out now that you want people to come away with?
- [48:53]
Amy Littlefield
I do. I am a hope kind of practitioner. Like, I actually do feel really hopeful and here's why. You know, the sort of murder and mystery paradigm, right, is about you find the quiet housekeeper and she's been lurking in the background. She's the person you least suspect and she's the one who did it. Right. And so I have these moments in the book where I'm sort of finding the equivalent of the quiet housekeeper, you know, the devious butler type, you know, and who's, who's there lurking behind the scenes and oh my gosh, this guy, guy has been going around, you know, living his retirement life and it turns out that he's contributed to, you know, this anti abortion policy that's had a huge impact on our country. I also though, find those people on the abortion rights side and these are the people who are, you know, sitting in New York or Massachusetts mailing out abortion medication to people in Texas or Mississippi be and risking, you know, their own livelihoods to do so. These are the people who in the heart of Texas, even though they know it will not pass, introduce legislation every year named for Rosie Jimenez, legislation that would enshrine full reproductive freedom into law in the state of Texas. They keep doing that. They know it's not going to happen this year or next year, but they keep doing it it because that's, you know, how the anti abortion movement won. That's how political victories happen, step by step, often when it looks hopeless, you know, over time. And, you know, I think now really is sort of the era of the quiet housekeeper. I mean, looking at what's happening in Minneapolis, you know, you have reporters out there in their bathrobes filming federal agents. You have moms and dads driving around in minivans. You know, sort of the people you least associate respect getting involved in the work of protecting neighbors and restoring freedom against the massive adversity that they face. And so I do try to sort of end on a hopeful note of documenting the people who are, you know, there is no, there is not going to be any big reveal or any huge moment of justice for any of these women who have died very tragically from abortion bans. You know, and of course, the contemporary examples are the women whose stories have been documented by ProPublica, you know, the women who have died in states like Texas and Georgia because they did not get timely care for miscarriages or following abortions, you know, for complications that could have been very easily treated if the state. If the. If the doctors hadn't been afraid of prosecution. Right. There is not going to be a huge moment where we say, okay, their deaths have been avenged. You know, that happens in novels. It doesn't happen in real life life. But instead, I think what is happening is that there is this quiet, slow, deliberate, and yet hugely significant work going on in the background to restore and even expand abortion rights. And I think that work took on new meaning and momentum in the wake of the Dobbs decision. And so I do see that, and I see resonances with the rest of the activism that's happening in the Trump era era, you know, where quiet, everyday people of the kind who killed abortion rights are doing the work of social justice and preserving reproductive freedom in, you know, corners of this country every day.
- [52:29]
Rebecca Buchanan
So, final question. The book comes out March 10th. So promotion, self promotion, either with this book. Anything else you're working on? What do you want people to know?
- [52:39]
Amy Littlefield
Yeah. Thank you for asking. So I am going to be doing some book events. People can follow me on Blue sky or on Instagram, where I'm ittleamyfield. And I will have some. I'm from Boston, so I'll have some events here in the Boston area at Brookline Booksmith, at Symposium Books in Providence. I'll also have an online event with the Nation magazine, which is sort of my publication home, and some excerpts there as well. And stay tuned for excerpts also from the New York Review of Books and from Lithub and Crime Reads. And you can go to my website also amylittlefield.com to find out more information about the book.
- [53:25]
Rebecca Buchanan
Amy, thank you so much for talking with me on New Books Network again. Amy Littlefield, who's the author of Killers of Roe, thank you for being here.
- [53:33]
Amy Littlefield
Thank you so much, Rebecca. Go.
- [53:47]
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