Review: Killers of Roe

Killers of Roe:

My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights

by Amy Littlefield (Grand Central Publishing)

This book is a history of the process from Roe, establishing the right to abortion in the United States, to Dobbs, removing that right. It uses the conceit of the whodunit novel in treating it as a murder-mystery to be solved, breaking out post-Roe into a series of interviews of suspects, or biographical sketches if unavailable, looking for someone who caused it.

The interviews here are the highlight. This is gonzo journalism (are we still using that term?) at its best for two reasons. First, it elevates the reporting through making the interviews lively and compelling to read. Second, it emphasizes the personal nature of the events here, both for the author directly in being a woman, and for women in general, but also because the attachment to the political cause of anti-abortion rights usually attaches to a personal event in someone’s life, rather than more abstract beliefs.

The murder-mystery aspect is uneven. I enjoyed it, but people are not tropes. It leads to bad impressions. The author is aware of this, and frets over the bed of Procrustes here, but ultimately still fluffs the pillows. Over the course of the book, the premise begins to fray as more contemporary and tertiary interviews are included. This, too, is uneven. Both the best and the worst interviews are in this category. Particularly with the broader inclusion of contemporary interviews, the book is not a history.

Since it is stylized as a murder-mystery, I will treat the book’s thesis as a spoiler. Or what I take as the thesis.¹ The book will land a glancing blow on several ideas, usually in a way that I wanted much more. But there is one chapter that seems to be the argument, that is lacking in an usual way. The idea has traction, but it does not match with the book’s structure. So much so that, if that is the thesis, it undermines the rest of the book.

I feel cynical about the book’s use of people who died from lack of access to abortion. It is meant to center the victims, but I was left feeling like it it was only a framing device, leading and closing with them to give the appearance not committing the original sin of true crime, but not committing to that in the body of the text. And for an author who chides others about snarky comments on people’s bodies, the author sure has a lot of snarky comments about people’s bodies.²

It is great journalism spoiled by the tyranny of the narrative. It is readable and emotive, and provides great material in the expert interviewing that the author does. But ultimately it is a book that makes me wish that I had read a book that focused its loose ends in order to answer its titular question of who killed Roe.

My thanks to the author, Amy Littlefield, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Grand Central Publishing, for making the ARC available to me.

The idea is that abortion right’s opponents were able to leverage the proponents willingness to give in on protecting the poor, and notably Black women, to gain incremental victories. For one, classic Schmitt. For two, this makes the author’s fretting about the civil rights analogies beloved by the right’s opponents off, because it is functionally the same method, just with the increase of rights. For three, it does mean that the book functionally commits the same error (or I think that if you want to center Black voices, you need to center Black voices in the opposition as well, lest you commit the same sin of treating Blackness as a sort of tool rather than an expression. And for four, it leads to the odd treatment of a failure as a success and a success as unimportant. ↩︎
And were I being snarky about it, I would give a sort of ‘oh, it’s fine to do to men,’ except that the point I noted it, in the interview where the author calls out the interviewee for doing it, is a woman.

Really, that interview ought to have been cut. It suffers some of the worst for the thread-danging. It is the Fermat’s Last Theorem of resolving the question of trans rights in the left in general and feminism in specific, and positions the book about sympathy to ones opponents in a manner that is never returned to. It is weird, and does not do anything unique that some other interview does not do better.. ↩︎