One Year of Dobbs

You Must Stand Up is journalist Amanda Becker’s almost real-time account of the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision. It begins with the Court’s release of its decision and follows several leaders who fought back and figured out ways to offer women healthcare in the aftermath of the decision.

This is Becker’s first book. Currently a journalist with The 19th, she has “been on the beat” for almost 20 years working for Reuters and other news groups covering presidential and congressional elections, Congress and the Supreme Court. She writes in the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book that as she scanned the draft decision for Dobbs (that had been leaked in May) she knew that the seismic change the pending decision would unleash would be “the most important story I’d ever cover as a journalist”.

Over the course of the next year her book takes us across the country as she relates stories from Colorado, Alabama, Maryland, Arizona, Louisiana, Kentucky and elsewhere. Her stories show people fighting to protect their rights, how they learned to adapt, and the hardships they faced because of Dobbs. There are setbacks and quiet victories.

On the one-year anniversary of Roe, Becker takes us to a rally of antiabortion groups at the nation’s capital. The rally headliner was Republican former Vice President Mike Pence. He told the group that “we’ve not come to the end of this cause”, but rather “the end of the beginning”. These groups were trying to work out where to go and what to do next, and “fetal personhood” was a goal they all shared.

Fetal personhood is the idea that a fetus, from the moment of conception, is a person with full legal rights. This idea also applies to fertilized eggs that are a result of in-vitro fertilization (IVF), some proportion of which remain frozen in storage at fertility clinics and may or may not ever be called for.

Mary Ziegler, abortion law historian, is quoted in the book as telling the Guardian newspaper that fetal personhood “has the potential to establish that abortion is always illegal and potentially to expose women to punishment…” The potential for criminalizing bad pregnancy outcomes like miscarriages and still births would be very real in a world where fetal personhood was the standard at law.

At the end of the first year of Dobbs Becker concludes that the way forward in the fight for abortion and reproductive rights will be long and hard. We could well be in for a multiyear fight that may require amending the Constitution. At the least, Dobbs will become a litmus test for future Supreme Court nomination hearings, just as Roe was for close to 50 years.

RATING: Four Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A nationwide story looking at the impact of Dobbs in its first year. Well-researched and compact, this book is a worthwhile survey of the post Dobbs fight for reproductive rights, a fight which may take many years before we get back to the set of rights enjoyed under Roe v. Wade.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I read an advanced reviewer’s copy of the book provided by NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury. The book was published earlier this month.