After more than four decades, the terms of engagement in the United States war over abortion seem fixed. It is assumed, wrongly, it turns out, that Roe v. Wade dictated the outcome: the emergence of single-issue opponents, engaged in an epic and endless battle. Mary Ziegler's history, After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate, tells the story of how we got where we are today. Specifically, she illuminates the manner in which we came to fight over abortion almost exclusively by fighting about abortion laws. Lawyers set the terms of engagement, lawyers fight the battles, and lawyers mastermind the strategies, be they short or long.

Ziegler's history does not offer a way out of our intractable abortion war, but it does show us the path that we took into it.

Informed by an extensive review of original sources and more than 100 interviews with key players on each side, Ziegler steeps her reader in the decade following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision. Through her, the reader hears voices of pro-life women who campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment. One encounters the opinions of politicians such as Jesse Jackson, whom we thought we knew. After Roe was decided, Jackson reached out to the National Right to Life Committee to express his interest in collaborating.

Rather than telling the story in chronological order, Ziegler organizes her chapters around each sides’ response to Roe. The reader sits in the living rooms of activists, religious leaders, politicians, and fellow travelers as they struggle to respond to the world of legalized abortions. Neither side had a clear vision, legal or otherwise, of what was supposed to happen after Roe. The chaos was bilateral.

Ziegler is a conscientious historian, and readers come to understand the flux, fractured alliances, and internal acrimony that marked the years immediately following Roe.

Anti-abortion forces endured pitched battles between “absolutists” and “incrementalists.” The mainstay of the early pro-life movement wanted nothing short of a constitutional amendment declaring the fetus to be a human being, entitled to full protection of the law. It took years for lawyers to wrest control over the movement, replacing the campaign for a human life amendment with a focus on short-term, attainable goals: fighting for laws that required parental consent, for example. And meanwhile, they girded for the decades-long battle that followed, channeling the activists’ energy into electing anti-abortion lawmakers and judges. It is not an accident, but rather, a consequence that the battle over abortion is fought in the legislature and in the courtroom.

In abortion rights circles, Ziegler shows how the broad coalition supporting legalized abortion in the years leading up to Roe quickly began to splinter. The environmentalists, the civil rights advocates, and the population control lobby all fell away for distinct, complex reasons that Ziegler manages to render with brevity and precision. In one of the book's most interesting sections, Ziegler recalls the wealth and power of the population control movement of the 1960s. With the support of elder statesmen like John D. Rockefeller III and leading academics such as Stanford's Paul Ehrlich, there was a consensus among many leaders of the era that population growth posed a threat to our way of life. Movements such as Zero Population Growth became powerful allies for those working to increase access to contraception and abortion. And then, as stories of forced sterilization and allegations of racism began to emerge, the population lobby quickly lost favor with women's groups, and society at large.

Ziegler chronicles the gradual narrowing of the frame through which we think about abortion. She suggests throughout the book that the outcome—a single-issue battle being waged in courts and voting booths—was not inevitable; however, she never states how it could have been otherwise. She offers no proof beyond conjecture and the long-forgotten voices of the moderates, the fellow travelers she finds on both sides in those early years after Roe.

Still, her book made me wonder: What might have happened if the grass-roots activists—the ones who know what makes a woman consider abortion—had been the ones to call the shots? Could Roe have occasioned a bipartisan commitment to offset the factor mostly commonly cited by women considering abortion, namely that they cannot afford to have this particular baby? Might both sides have united to frame policy with the goal that no woman should feel compelled to have an abortion because she cannot afford to have a baby?

Instead, the 1980s ushered in the Reagan era, replete with images of welfare queens having babies in order to stay on the public dole. Rather than focusing on how best to reduce unplanned pregnancy or how best to offset the costs of motherhood, the government, liberals and conservatives alike, enacted polices that, to this day, circumscribe poor women’s reproductive options. On the one hand, lawmakers denied federal funding for abortions, and on the other hand, they passed welfare “reform” laws that penalized women who have “additional children” by capping their monthly payments.

In spite of Ziegler’s insistence that it wasn’t inevitable, in the end the reader is left with the sense that, actually, it was only a matter of time before the lawyers took over from the activists. The result is our seemingly endless struggle over abortion laws—a struggle that scarcely touches on the structural factors that shape when and whether a woman will consider terminating a pregnancy.

After Roe’s gift is to allow us to see our abortion discourse as paltry. Ziegler shows the reader a time when many people cared deeply about abortion, but in complicated ways. It would have seemed absurd to them to imagine framing the entire abortion debate as “choice” versus “life.” Ziegler gives us front row seats from which we watch helplessly as the two movements shift from their initial moorings in broad, multi-issue alliances into the balkanized landscape that we grimly recognize as our own.