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by Alexandra Zayas

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As all eyes were on the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday after a leaked draft majority opinion indicated it is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, ProPublica spoke with journalist Joshua Prager, who spent 11 years dissecting the landmark case that guaranteed abortion rights for women across the country. For his acclaimed book “The Family Roe: An American Story,” Prager interviewed upwards of 500 people including key figures on both sides of the case, most notably its plaintiff, Norma McCorvey, who was better known as Jane Roe. In delving into the untold story behind her life, those of the children she gave birth to and the monumental case, Prager unfurled the decadeslong history of the American war over abortion.

Prager said indicators of the justices’ leanings were clear while observing arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case challenging a 2018 Mississippi law prohibiting most abortions after 15 weeks’ gestational age, which is the subject of the Supreme Court’s draft opinion. Though the Court confirmed the authenticity of the document published this week by Politico, the final vote and decision are still pending. Prager discussed why he believed the road to this week’s revelation was paved, in part, by decades of mistakes and missed opportunities made by the pro-choice movement. (In his book, Prager refers to those who support the right to abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-choice,” and those opposing abortion the way they refer to themselves, “pro-life.” We adhered to these conventions during our interview. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.)

Did you expect this day would come?

I absolutely did. Anyone who was a close follower of the issue could see that this was happening when we listened to the oral arguments in Dobbs. We knew where all of the justices stood pretty much, but there were two who we thought might go either way, Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett, Justice (Brett) Kavanaugh — two of Trump’s three appointments. And to listen to them speak and question during oral arguments in Dobbs, we could see where they were going.

Kavanaugh, over and again, was speaking about precedents that the Supreme Court had previously overturned. Justice Barrett, meantime, was speaking about the fact that adoption is, as she put it, a viable alternative to abortion.

What was so fascinating about this and tragic, if you’re a person who believes that Roe ought not to be overturned, was that the Supreme Court did not need Justice (John) Roberts, the chief justice anymore; the conservative bloc now doesn’t need him. They have the votes that they need 5 to 4 without him. He is an incrementalist. He is a person who respects precedent. He really cares about the image of the court, does not want it to be seen as simply a political body. And he was desperate to not actually have the headline that we had last night. He wanted to see Roe maintained, but sort of gutted. But he lost.

So this was not a surprise. If you step back further, when Roe was ruled upon in 1973, it galvanized those opposed to it. And it gave (the pro-life movement) a very simple, clear target, a new raison d’etre: We want to overturn Roe. This is the culmination of 49 1/2 years of efforts and different approaches, novel approaches. And unfortunately, again, if you are a person who believes in reproductive choice, the pro-choice did not take a lot of that seriously for many years, and they are as much to, sort of, blame for this day as the pro-life will (take) credit for.

Tell me a little more about the blame the pro-choice movement shares.

(The pro-choice movement) did not foresee a war here. NARAL’s executive director in 1973, when Roe was ruled upon, told her board after the ruling, “The court has spoken and the case is closed.” They saw this as, basically: It’s over. We’ve won.

The very, very opposite is true of the pro-life, who said: OK, now we have to think about this strategically, how will we go about overturning Roe? As a result of that imbalance, the pro-choice were playing catch up really for 49 1/2 years, as the pro-life (movement has) over and over again come up with many different ways to chip away at Roe and has been remarkably successful. Just to give you a few examples:

• 1976, the Hyde Amendment, which said that you can no longer pay for abortion with Medicaid.
• 1989, the case of Webster, that was a ruling against the use of public resources for abortion.
• 2007, Gonzales v. Carhart banned a specific type of abortion procedure.
• And then of course, just this year in Texas with SB-8, it was a very novel approach coming up with a way to have an end run around the enforcement of abortion by deputizing private citizens to sue anyone who was helping someone have an abortion in any way.

The pro-life also used technology in a way that had never been used before by showing fetal photography. They used language that had never been used before, for example, coining the phrase “partial-birth abortion.”

They also used pseudoscience in a remarkable way. They came up with this very novel approach called “post-abortion syndrome,” saying that if a woman had an abortion, an enormous percentage of the time, she would suffer psychologically as a result of that. That’s not true. In fact, the opposite is true. The majority of women who have abortions express relief as opposed to regret. If there is something that causes women grief, the studies show, it is relinquishing their child to adoption. These were all pro-life weapons in attacking Roe, and over and over again, you had the pro-choice movement outfoxed.

In the early 2000s, one of the attacks on Roe was led by lawyer Allan Parker, who had represented Norma for a time. (The suit) said that Roe needed to become null and void because conditions had changed in the years since it had been filed. And the only way to file this suit was to have the original plaintiff file it. So he came to represent Norma and he filed this suit.

What ended up happening was that the pro-choice basically ignored the suit. They said that it was a sad publicity stunt, and they did not file a single brief defending Roe in this case. And it ended up introducing into the judicial system these affidavits filed by women who said that abortion harmed them. And that idea ended up going right up to the Supreme Court. Justice (Anthony) Kennedy ended up citing them in 2007 in Gonzales v. Carhart. It was evident that Parker’s lawsuit had been incredibly effective and powerful.

It shows all of the different ways in which the pro-choice have failed to meet the pro-life, have failed to repel their arguments and their strategies. And it speaks to a simple human reality that it’s much easier to try to knock something down than to defend it. What we’re going to see now is the very same problem that the pro-choice had, the pro-life now are going to have, because now you are going to see that this is going to galvanize the tens of millions of people who are horrified about what’s happening now. They now will have as simple a marching order as the pro-life used to have to reinstate Roe or to come up with another way to ensure that abortion will be legal for women across the country.

Roe was 1 day old in 1973 when Bella Abzug, who was a House representative from New York, urged Congress to codify Roe. She basically foresaw exactly where we are today, that there was the potential legislation to erode Roe. She introduced an act: The Abortion Rights Act, H.R. 254, to bar states from creating new (laws) on abortion. Congress ignored her bill, and anyway, it was doomed to failure because Roe allowed for future legislation. It gave states the right to oppose regulations from the second trimester onward, but here we are now and people want to go back and do exactly what Bella Abzug was saying that we ought to do.

Is there any more evidence that pro-choice leaders made mistakes that allowed this to happen? Where does the pro-choice movement go from here?

It’s not only true, but something that, case in point, was embodied by Justice (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg’s decision to not step down from the court in her 80s, during Obama’s presidency. We would not be here had she done that. That is a simple fact. And that is a very painful fact, for she’s obviously the greatest hero over the course of 50 years to the pro-choice movement, but whether it was hubris or it was an inability to see that Trump might be elected or just a very human, understandable desire to hold onto a job she loved, it was nonetheless a mistake with catastrophic consequences. And that, you can say, was the final nail in the coffin for Roe, but it was also the latest in a long line of missteps by the pro-choice of failing to properly address the situation in which they found themselves.

And here we are, but again, it’s now going to flip. If you’re a person who cares about choice, that is the silver lining of this very dark, dark cloud that it is now going to galvanize in a way we have not seen in our lifetimes, those who believe in a right to choose.

EAST ALTON – Three National Great Rivers Research and Education Center (NGRREC sm ) staff members were among the experts featured during the 2022 annual meeting of the Illinois Chapter of The Wildlife Society (ICTWS). The three-day meeting was held April 10-12 in the Commons on Lewis and Clark Community College’s Godfrey Campus. It featured 18 talks and 20 poster presenters, who discussed topics pertaining to wildlife monitoring and management, disease, ecology, and more. NGRREC had three staff, Phil Rathz, Jacob Decker and Melissa Schindler participate in the poster session. Decker, a recent Lewis and Clark Community College (L&C) graduate and member of the NGRREC Habitat Strike Team, won first place in the undergraduate student category for his poster highlighting his research utilizing trail cameras, which he completed last summer during his time as an NGRREC intern. “It was my first ICTWS annual conference meeting,” Habitat Junior Assistant Jacob Decker

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ALTON - Christie Rickman, a special needs teacher at Alton High School, wanted the community to know of an effort she considered a blessing for students recently at the NCG Movie Theater in Alton. NCG hosted the Autism and Intellectual Physical Disabilities Community Trip. NCG discounted the movie price for the students and allowed them to see a movie that definitely sparked their attention - "Sonic the Hedgehog 2." NCG accommodated the students with many sensory options from lighting, to sound, etc. There also was plenty of popcorn and drinks available for the students. Mrs. Barron and Ms. Prott's Alton classes joined Mrs. Rickman's class at the event. “NCG is such a blessing to our community for granting access to a larger part of our community,” Rickman said. “They accommodated so many diverse special needs on the day of our trip. We have several children with autism or on the spectrum and also had deaf and hard of hearing students, students in wheelchairs,

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"St. Louis, America's 'Murder Capital' but the bigger killer here is fentanyl addiction." Those are the chilling opening lines of a new BBC documentary from their Unreported World series posted to YouTube.

An important artifact believed to have been lost for a century has been found.

The government of India still claims to be a democracy, but its decade-long assault on the internet and the rights of its citizens suggests it would rather be an autocracy. The country is already host to one of the largest biometric databases in the world, housing information collected from nearly every one of its 1.2 […]

The 2022 Cloud Computing And DevOps Super Bundle will teach you everything you need to know to build and manage your own Cloud Computing and DevOps environment. It’s jam-packed with all the most effective, time-tested techniques for building a fully-automated DevOps environment without any experience or previous knowledge of Cloud Computing. It’s on sale for […]

Amelia Bond, the founder of Give STL Day, says that two years on, nonprofits are still trying to regain strength after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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BELLEVILLE - After a competitive bidding process, St. Clair County Transit District (SCCTD) today announced Belleville-based Hank’s Excavating & Landscaping, Inc. was awarded a $767,952 construction contract for Phase I of the Old Collinsville Road Trail. This approximately ¾ mile-long trail project will connect Richland Creek Bikeway in Swansea to Lebanon Avenue in Belleville, as well as to the Old Collinsville Road Bike Trail Phase II project currently under construction from Lake Lorraine Drive to Munie Road in Swansea. This latest phase will further extend the reach of the MetroBikeLink System, which features 14 continuous miles of trails in Southwestern Illinois and links users to six Metro Transit Centers. Phase I of the Old Collinsville Road Trail will feature a separate 10-foot-wide, shared-use, asphalt path within the Old Collinsville Road right of way; a pedestrian bridge over Richland Creek; and traffic signal modifications for safe crossing at Lebanon Avenue.

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This story was original published in our sister paper the San Antonio Current. A new study has determined that people in states where cannabis is legal are less likely to drive while stoned than people in states where weed remains criminalized. The study, published this month in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports, analyzed self-reported data from a national survey on cannabis use.

CAIRO – On April 29th, 2022, Mary Davis, a 68-year-old female from Carbondale, was found guilty on charges of First-Degree Murder and Concealment of a Homicidal Death during a jury trial in Alexander County. Davis was convicted of the 2018 murder of 63-year-old Tomie Edwards. Edwards’ body was discovered by Kentucky authorities in the Mississippi River on May 22, 2018. The murder investigation was led by the Illinois State Police (ISP) Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) Zone 7. The Illinois State Police was assisted by the Cairo Police Department, Alexander County State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Kentucky State Police. A sentencing hearing for Davis is scheduled for June 29 th in Alexander County court. No further information will be disseminated at this time.

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GRANITE CITY – Senior three-sport student-athlete Ella Stepanek was named the 2021-22 Granite City High School Scholar Athlete of the Year, as announced by GCHS. Stepanek will be recognized at Busch Stadium on May 11 as part of the 56th Annual St. Louis Post-Dispatch Scholar Athlete Team. In addition, she will be recognized in the special section of the newspaper and online at STLhighschoolsports.com . "I’m extremely honored to have received this award, but without support from my coaches and family I wouldn’t have been able to earn this achievement. They’ve helped me maintain a schedule filled with sporting events and school functions," said Stepanek. "Even though it is challenging to maintain the demands of both sports and school, I think that in doing so it has given me an immense amount of pride in my achievements for both athletics and academics. I have learned that if I am willing to put the work in, success will eventually follow, and the responsibility

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For the second year, Trailnet is releasing quarterly Crash Reports, which compare the number of bicycle, pedestrian, and vehicular crashes over a three-month period to the same time period in …

The post 2022 Quarter 1 Crash Report appeared first on Trailnet.

While brunch and flowers are classic ways to fete Mom, there are plenty of other options this weekend.

BETHALTO - Lt. Scott Van Hoy is a pilot commander of P-8 Satellite Planes for the U.S. Navy. This past week, he was able to practice some landing touch-downs in the training of another pilot at St. Louis Regional Airport in Bethalto. For his parents and grandfather, it was a thrill to watch him in action, which is next to impossible because of what he does for the Navy. Vern Van Hoy, his father, said his dad is 92 years old and was a B-29 pilot and was in tears watching him. Lt. Van Hoy was on a 6-hour mission with the touch-downs and is based in Jacksonville, Fla. “We are very proud of him,” Vern Van Hoy said. “He can’t tell us anything when he is deployed or when he is overseas, so this was special for us.” Lt. Van Hoy went through the ROTC program at the University of Illinois on a full scholarship. He had always wanted to be a pilot, his father said. “He has been deployed twice to the South China Sea,” his dad said. “He is now

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WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service has announced several additions to the 2022 stamp program first announced last fall. All stamp designs are preliminary and subject to change. Additional details, including issue dates and locations, will be announced later. Charles M. Schulz New stamps salute the centennial of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922–2000) whose “Peanuts” characters are some of the best known and most beloved in all of American culture. For five decades, Schulz alone wrote and drew nearly 18,000 strips, the last one published the day after he died. Each character reflects Schulz’s rich imagination and great humanity. His resonant stories found humor in life’s painful realities including rejection, insecurity, and unrequited love. In a celebratory mode, characters from “Peanuts” adorn 10 designs on this pane of 20 stamps and form a frame around a 1987 photograph of Schulz. Art director Greg Breeding designed the stamps

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A rare, antique tractor set a pair of world records at a recent online auction.