Rethinking Strategy After Dobbs

The Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturns nearly fifty years of precedent and radically changes abortion law, throwing both sides of the debate into uncharted territory. This Essay, published in the immediate aftermath of Dobbs, offers some initial thoughts about what the changed legal landscape means for abortion rights legal advocacy. Our focus in recent writings has been to identify concrete measures that federal and state actors can take to secure abortion access after Dobbs. Here, we explore what we believe to be an immediate overarching concern: What strategies should govern the abortion rights movement going forward? To that end, we identify three themes: (1) trying creative, sometimes novel, approaches to put the antiabortion movement into a defensive posture, (2) expecting and embracing disagreement among abortion rights supporters, and (3) playing the long game. This will require a paradigm shift in movement strategy—one that is in some ways modeled after the now-successful movement to overturn Roe. Such a paradigm shift takes time, will, and responsiveness to change.