For two years, since the Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion, the country has waged a bitter fight over women’s health, government power, individual choice, and efforts to ban or guarantee access to the procedure.
At the heart of this conflict is Mary Ziegler: interpreter, guide, prognosticator.
Every time a law is passed, a court decision is rendered, a medical horror story surfaces – which is not uncommon – Ziegler is invariably asked to intervene from his perch at the ‘UC Davis. She gave up to 15 interviews a day.
This omnipresent presence, Ziegler’s frequent written commentaries and the six books she has published, with a seventh in progress, have made the 42-year-old law professor, according to historian David Garrow, the preeminent authority of the 50 last years. wars against abortion.
“One of the hallmarks of Ziegler’s scholarship,” he noted in a glowing 2021 book review, “is his contact with activists and litigators on both sides.”
That’s why she’s a trusted and valuable source, residing on the short list of countless journalists across the country.
Ziegler, who came to Davis in 2022 through Florida State University, didn’t set out to become a one-stop clearinghouse for abortion history, commentary and arcana. Her curiosity led her there.
She developed her interest in the mid-2000s while studying at Harvard Law School.
A “legal history nerd,” Ziegler noted a dearth of academic research on the social and political fallout from Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established the constitutional right to abortion. She began diving into digitized newspaper archives to learn more and began writing prolifically on the subject.
Initially, “I didn’t think I would do anything professionally,” Ziegler said last week over lunch in this Bay Area enclave she calls home. “What I was interested in was just pure curiosity.”
“At the time,” she added with a laugh, his scholarship “obviously wasn’t as relevant as it later turned out to be.”
(Ziegler’s father, a French professor, urged her to pursue a practical, reasonably well-paying career. She considered medicine, but didn’t like the sight of blood. So the faculty did by right.)
Ziegler, who published her first book addressing the issue of abortion in 2015, did not necessarily anticipate the overturning of Roe, which helped make her a quasi-judicial and media celebrity. While opponents continually sought to chip away at the landmark decision, many viewed the issue as “settled law” — which is how Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh described Roe in 2018 as he faced upon Senate confirmation. (In 2022, Kavanaugh was part of the 5-4 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that overturned the nearly half-century-old ruling.)
The day the court issued that ruling, Ziegler immersed herself in her work, writing furiously and conducting a long series of back-to-back interviews. When she finished, she broke down and cried.
This wasn’t just about the abolition of a constitutional right, said Ziegler, an avowed feminist and supporter of legalizing abortion.
“I remember reading Dobbs and the idea that somehow this was going to make things better and people were going to stop fighting. I remember thinking, this is definitely not going to happen,” she said. “I thought about all the unintended consequences this was going to have,” such as being denied urgent medical care – even in cases unrelated to abortion.
“This doesn’t mean I’m bashing people who think abortion is wrong. But, to me, criminalization and all that it entails has always been a dark part of American history. I saw that this put us on a path to more conflict, not less.
Which turned out to be completely true.
Ziegler sees the next few years as a game of tug-of-war between conservative judges, anti-abortion lawmakers and the majority of Americans who, by and large, want abortion to remain legal and accessible.
(Bill Lax/UC Davis)
In a recent article on Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis and her gubernatorial ambitions, your friendly columnist ventured to say that the right to abortion was rock solid in California, with its constitutional guarantee and hegemonic control of Democrats in Sacramento.
Ziegler doesn’t necessarily agree.
“I don’t think Congress will do anything,” she said, underscoring the risk of a serious political backlash. “I’m less sure about (former President) Trump.”
If elected in November, she said, Trump could unilaterally invoke the Comstock Act, a dusty 1873 anti-vice law that could serve as an effective nationwide abortion ban. Although she didn’t make any predictions, Ziegler didn’t rule out the possibility. With Trump, you never know.
“I don’t think it’s a crisis,” she said. “That seems exaggerated to me. But I also think that total complacency… is also a mistake.”
“On the one hand,” she continued, “it won’t be popular if he does it. On the other hand, I don’t know what his motivations are if he can’t run for office. Maybe his donors like that. Maybe the base voters who buy his products like him.
A pale sun shone on San Francisco Bay as tourists strolled the waterfront promenade. Politics and the abortion debate seemed distant for the moment.
Ziegler sees the next few years as a game of tug-of-war between conservative judges, anti-abortion lawmakers and the majority of Americans who, by and large, want abortion to remain legal and accessible.
“I think it depends on who decides, and I don’t mean in the classic ‘It’s my body, my choice’ way of who decides,” Ziegler said. “We have seen so far that most voters, when polled directly, want abortion to be largely legal, particularly early in pregnancy and increasingly later in pregnancy as well …But I think there are many possibilities where that doesn’t happen.
With that, she put her remains in a box and headed home, to further explain and explore the fight against abortion in the United States.
California Daily Newspapers
