Bracing for a Post-Roe America

A conversation with Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winning science journalist, on why many Americans believe the Supreme Court may now be our nation's greatest threat to public health.

A postwar Lysol ad from Cailtin Flanagan’s 2019 Atlantic article “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate,” in which she documents how Lysol was “commonly used in abortions” before Roe v. Wade.

By Michael Judge

I’d been planning for weeks to talk with Laurie Garrett—author of The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust and by far journalism’s most celebrated science writer, indeed the only writer ever to win all three of the Big “Ps” of journalism—the Pulitzer, the Peabody, and the Polk—when Politico published the leaked draft of the Supreme Court’s opinion striking down Roe v. Wade.

Suddenly, my questions about what we’ve learned—or failed to learn—at this stage in the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic seemed, if not unimportant, irrelevant during one of the most furiously manic news cycles I’ve ever seen.

As the Politico exclusive revealed, “The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a…