And now, amid the applause,
A.D.F. leaders looked ahead.

Their ultimate goal was sweeping change across America to preserve the values of conservative Christians.

A.D.F. was, after all, a “religious ministry,”
not just a legal network,
as Kristen Waggoner said in an interview.

Ending abortion was the first target, but A.D.F. had already begun planning for more.

According to an internal strategy document dated to May 2021,
A.D.F. leaders set out to achieve what they called
“generational wins,”

victories that,
like overturning Roe,
would change the law and the culture of America
for an entire generation.

The document, never before reported,
reveals secret details of the legal decisions A.D.F. hopes to challenge in the coming years.

A.D.F. lawyers would work to reverse the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in
Employment Division v. Smith,
to “fully protect the free exercise of religion,”
the strategy document explained.

That decision, written by Scalia,
ruled that religious beliefs did not excuse disobeying laws.

They would pursue litigation to enforce free-speech rights on college campuses.

They would push legislation to protect the freedom of association there as well,
to eventually overturn a decision that Ginsburg wrote in
Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.

The ruling allowed a public university not to recognize a Christian student group that excluded gay students.

In his dissent, Alito called the decision a “serious setback for freedom of expression.”

They would target L.G.B.T.Q. rights and protections
and “stop efforts to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to protected-class status in the law akin to race.”

They would “work to restore an understanding of marriage, the family and sexuality
that reflects God’s creative order.”

And they wanted the court to
strengthen parental rights over state authority
by having the court revisit the 2000 case Troxel v. Granville,
which allowed the state to override a parent’s wishes in some circumstances.

A.D.F. would work to pass state legislation, similar to its approach on abortion,
that would prioritize parental rights in medical decisions for minors who say they are transgender,
to prevent parents from “being coerced into consenting to life-changing, ill-advised surgeries and procedures in the wake of gender dysphoria.”

It was an agenda that would inflame their liberal opponents and that not even everyone in the ballroom knew about.

(An A.D.F. official distanced the organization from the specific cases named in the document,
saying its legal strategies shift based on precedent and current events.)

(14/n)

After Stewart argued the case at the Supreme Court in December 2021,
leaders of the anti-abortion movement gathered that evening
at the JW Marriott in Washington
for an invitation-only dinner banquet
sponsored by A.D.F.

Everyone from the network seemed to be there,
and A.D.F. gave out party favors of small wooden plaques
depicting a pregnant woman leaning against a Supreme Court column.

The mood was celebratory even though their ultimate victory wouldn’t come for another six months,
with the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson that would overturn Roe.

Marjorie Dannenfelser was in the room.
As were local activists who pushed abortion bans through their statehouses.

Authors of the amicus briefs supporting Stewart’s case.
Becky Currie, who believed she had come up with the idea of the 15-week law in Mississippi.

Many participants knew only the small part they played,
not how the whole fit together.

Currie met Stewart briefly that night for the first time.

“He couldn’t pick me out of a crowd,” she said.

Onstage, Lynn Fitch, Scott Stewart and Erin Hawley sat proudly
as they described how they had gotten to this moment.

“First of all, to God be the glory,” Fitch began.

“We all prayed, worked so hard for this day.
It all came together because everyone here,
everyone that’s been involved across our country,
we’re believers,
and we knew this day would come,” she said.

“God selected this case. He was ready.
The justices were ready to hear what we were all going to be talking about.”

For those listening,
the people around them in that ballroom
and all they accomplished represented
a vision of the kingdom of God
coming on Earth,
as Jesus’ prayer taught in the Gospels.

Their work offered a vision of what a modern Christian empire looked like.

It did not involve violent crusaders or declaring an official state religion.

It was not clerics instituting a theocracy.

The anti-abortion movement had used the existing system to define the Constitution the way it saw fit.

A right was not being taken away from women,
the movement argued,
because it never should have existed in the first place.

Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg had said Roe,
rooted in a right to privacy,
wasn’t built on the strongest legal ground.

An argument explicitly based on a constitutional right to equal protection would have better protected it from challenges, she argued.

A.D.F.’s strategy on Dobbs reflected how it believed it could reshape America
and overtake majority opinion.

There’s a saying that law is downstream from culture,
said Greg Scott, a former longtime communications strategist for A.D.F.,
explaining the idea in an interview that a cause gains popular support first
and then the law formalizes those beliefs.

“I actually reject that,” he said.

“We are in this feedback loop and this ecosystem where frequently that is true.

But then at other times, the law does drive culture.”

(13/n)

Stewart’s thinking reflected the shifts that had overtaken the anti-abortion movement and the conservative legal project
during the Trump administration.

For four years, they had gone bigger and bolder than what previously felt possible.

Courts blocked many of their state abortion bans. But the efforts themselves had further opened the window of possibilities.

To overturn Roe, conservatives had to directly ask the court to do so.

A.D.F. might have been skittish about making the request, but Fitch and Stewart were not.

While the anti-abortion views of the movement’s leaders still represented a distinct minority of the country,
they had built an elite legal and ideological ecosystem of activists, organizations, lawmakers and pro bono lawyers around their cause.

Their policy arms churned out legal arguments and medical studies.

Their lawyers argued their cases, and their judges ruled on them,
all fostered by the bench that Leo built.

And their allied lawmakers pushed their agenda in statehouses and Congress.

Yet despite their overwhelming success, many on the left continued to underestimate them. It was their greatest strength.

Behind closed doors, Fitch’s team drew up a nine-slide blueprint, marked “Confidential”:
a 12-month political and public-relations strategy in the run-up to the expected court decision on Dobbs in June 2022.

“Strategy to maximize impact at SCOTUS,” it began.

The whole operation was surprisingly low-budget,
estimated as up to $231,000,
to be paid out of the attorney general’s office and Fitch’s political fund,
according to the private document.

When Stewart filed the new brief for Mississippi that July,
his argument was a full-scale assault on a precedent that had defined American life for nearly half a century,
in plain language.

“Roe and Casey are egregiously wrong,” he wrote.

“The conclusion that abortion is a constitutional right has no basis in text,
structure, history,
or tradition.”

That same month, Stewart attended a reunion of Thomas’s law clerks hosted at a West Virginia resort by the justice
— before whom he would soon argue his case.

If Stewart won, Roe would fall.

At least 13 states already had trigger bans on the books,
making them certain to move quickly to ban abortion,
with very limited exceptions.

And at least a dozen more states were likely to follow quickly with their own restrictions.

A victory by Mississippi could make abortion illegal in about half the country.

(12/n)

Squeezed around a long table,
A.D.F. lawyers lined up on one side
and the Mississippi team on the other.

This private meeting,
one kept secret from the press,
top politicians and even other allies in the anti-abortion coalition,
would signify a pivotal turning point in the strategy of their movement.

This account of the meeting is based on interviews with multiple participants and people familiar with the discussion.

The A.D.F. lawyers outlined their thinking.

Priority No. 1, they argued, was to get the Supreme Court to
remove the viability line established in Roe as the limit for when states could ban abortion.

Removing that limit
— about 24 weeks
— would open the door to all kinds of restrictions being upheld by lower courts.

It would be a huge victory for their cause.

It was a backdoor way of gutting Roe,
invalidating the central principle of the original decision,
without requiring the justices to take the thornier step of overturning 50 years of precedent.

Stewart disagreed.

The lawmakers of Mississippi had enacted a law,
and that law was fundamentally incompatible with Roe, he argued.

“The people of Mississippi are pro-life,” he told the room,
according to Erin Hawley.

“They enacted this law. It is my duty to defend it to the best of my ability, and the right thing to do is to ask the court to overrule Roe.”

The only effective strategy, Stewart said,
according to participants,
was to target the very heart of it all:
the right to abortion that the court had found via
a right to privacy
that it decided was protected by the due-process clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1973.

The best argument was that Roe was wrong, he decided.

Some of the A.D.F. lawyers bristled.

Stewart’s plan felt risky and aggressive.

If the court wanted to use this case to overturn Roe, it could,
the A.D.F. team argued.

But to ask for that explicitly could be pushing too far too fast,
even for this new court.

A defeat would be devastating,
potentially even going so far as to reaffirm abortion rights in some way
and create another precedent to fight.

There was a lot to consider.

It wasn’t totally clear that they had five votes to fully overturn Roe right now.

Certainly, it was the best court they had faced in a long time.

But the 6-3 conservative majority was still new,
and the country was still reeling from the contentious Supreme Court battles of the Trump era.

And looming over the conversation was the reality that
Stewart had never argued a case at the Supreme Court.

By this point, A.D.F. lawyers had argued and won 12 Supreme Court cases.

The A.D.F. lawyers’ message was clear:
The safest path to victory was their plan.

They should simply ask the court to uphold their 15-week law.

Fitch’s team was grateful for A.D.F.’s help.
But to them, this had the feel of a power grab
— a bunch of Washington lawyers coming down to Jackson to take over once there was a chance to make history.

This was Fitch’s case.

She had chosen Stewart, and Stewart was determined.

Mississippi would forge its own path.

“Like everything else, you get four attorneys in a room, you’re going to get 10 opinions,”
Kevin Theriot, an A.D.F. lawyer, said later in an interview,
adding that he was on the phone for part of the meeting.

“It’s not that our original strategy went out the window.
It was just that instead of making
‘You should overturn Roe’ the second argument,
they made it the first argument.”

(11/n)

It was not a moment for compromise, Stewart reasoned,
according to people familiar with his thinking.

It was a lesson he had learned from Thomas,
his former boss and mentor,
who was known to hold the line without deviation.

He would be steadfast:
Roe and Casey were wrong and must be reversed.

Within weeks, in early June 2021,
A.D.F. lawyers were on flights to Jackson.

It was a crucial moment for the entire anti-abortion coalition.

But even after years of pushing for this singular goal,
the coalition was not a monolith.

Stewart wanted to openly ask the Supreme Court to
overturn Roe.

A.D.F. also wanted Roe overturned, of course
— its ultimate target was to ban abortion nationwide at conception
— but it favored a more limited, less risky approach,
lawyers at the organization recalled in a series of interviews.

And they saw the Dobbs case as their project.

Now they just had to make sure Stewart and Fitch didn’t jeopardize the plan that had been laid almost six years earlier with Tseytlin at the Mayflower Hotel.

The A.D.F. lawyers rode the old mirrored elevators of the Walter Sillers State Office Building in Jackson to the 12th floor
for a private meeting with Fitch and Stewart.

This could be the case of a generation, and A.D.F. wasn’t about to cede control.

A.D.F.’s incoming president,
Kristen #Waggoner,
brought a core team of top-notch attorneys and media experts,
including a new lawyer A.D.F. had hired:
Erin #Hawley, a graduate of Yale Law School.

She was married to Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri.

Overturning Roe was a joint mission for the Hawleys, who met as clerks for Chief Justice Roberts.

(10/n)

Over the past decade and a half, the job of state solicitor general had become a coveted slot for ambitious young lawyers,
even a path to more prominent posts like judgeships.

For Stewart, the opportunity was ideal
— representing a Republican state when there was a Democratic president offered the potential for high-profile conflict.

And there was the lure of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health,
the Mississippi case named for its petitioner,
Thomas Dobbs
(whose name was on the case in his capacity as a state health officer),
which had been appealed up to the Supreme Court.

Dobbs could be Stewart’s first chance to argue a case before the justices.

Stewart had clerked for Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain,
a pugnacious voice for right-wing judicial thought on the liberal Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit,
and for Clarence Thomas,
parlaying his conservative credentials into a post on Trump’s transition team,
assessing the legality of various potential policies.

When he got the job in Mississippi, a friend he had worked with at Gibson Dunn,
a law firm known in Washington as a conservative powerhouse,
reached out to congratulate him and share advice on becoming a new solicitor general.

It was Misha Tseytlin.

Now Fitch and Stewart watched the Supreme Court seem to ignore their case for months.

And like their opponents, they found the apparent indecision strange.

Everyone had a theory about why the justices were dragging their feet.

Maybe they would decide to not hear the case at all.

The silence broke one morning in May 2021.

Fitch was on her way to the airport after attending an event hosted by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

That weekend, the organization held an exclusive gathering at a private island on the secluded coast of southeast Georgia
nestled between the marsh and the sea.

There, corporate bigwigs schmoozed with top state law-enforcement leaders,
people like Fitch,
who would often determine the fate of their interests in America’s highest courts.

Now Fitch stared at the text from her chief of staff,
Michelle Williams,
trying to absorb the magnitude:
“We just got cert.”

The Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case that could strike at Roe.

The hopes of the conservative movement,
and the fears of those who supported abortion rights,
rested with Mississippi.

Stewart had to decide on a strategy.

Fitch’s petition for certiorari focused on upholding the Mississippi law
and mentioned the possibility of overturning Roe only in a footnote:
“If the Court determines that it cannot reconcile Roe and Casey with other precedents
or scientific advancements showing a compelling state interest in fetal life far earlier in pregnancy than those cases contemplate,
the Court should not retain erroneous precedent.”

Stewart knew that a lot of lawyers would encourage him to continue down that easier path,
to simply argue that Mississippi’s law should be upheld.

To not push for the complete overturn of Roe but to chip away
— as the movement had for so many decades
— and get the court to undo the viability standard.

But for Stewart, these circumstances were different from those in the past.

Trump had pushed their cause from the biggest bully pulpit in the land.

Conservatives now had a majority on the court that seemed to be on their side.

(9/n)

Trump introduced Amy Coney #Barrett as his nominee in the Rose Garden, in the same place where Bill Clinton introduced Ginsburg in 1993.

Back then, Dannenfelser was 27 and dreaming of carving out a more powerful place for conservative anti-abortion women in Washington.

That was half a lifetime ago. Now, at 54, she and those women sat in the Rose Garden watching Barrett,
a Catholic mother of seven whom Trump had said he had been “saving” to succeed Ginsburg,
become the avatar of the culture they wanted to usher in for America.

Barrett was both Christian supermom and high-powered legal scholar,
elite and outsider,
a combination of the more secular conservative Federalist Society credentials
and the beliefs of the emerging Christian legal movement.

This new iteration of conservative feminism didn’t argue that women’s gains should be rolled back
or that women should not be professionally ambitious.

But it wanted those advances not to come at the expense of ideals of motherhood,
Christian morality
and the centrality of human life at conception.

Seven days before the 2020 presidential election,
Leonard Leo tuned in from his home in Maine to watch his close friend
Clarence Thomas swear in Barrett to the court.

Watching her raise her right hand felt like the culmination of the entire project.

It was, he said in an interview,
“exhilarating.”

Trump had become the most successful anti-abortion president America had ever known.

His administration transformed the judiciary.

With his speech to the March for Life in 2020
— the first time a sitting president attended
— and graphic comments in his 2019 State of the Union address about how abortion providers “execute a baby,”
he changed political expectations and red lines for Republican presidents.

What Trump and his Republican allies had done was to change the country
by leveraging political force to conquer the courts.

Trump had promised conservative Christians that
“Christianity will have power.”

And now that vision was at the center of a Republican Party they had remade.

Scott #Stewart had never set foot in Mississippi.

But Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election thrust the young lawyer from the Department of Justice onto the job market,
and Lynn #Fitch, Mississippi’s attorney general, had reached out.

She needed a new solicitor general to lead the state’s biggest cases.

Fitch’s team found Stewart’s name tucked into a pile of résumés from the Republican Attorneys General Association,
a group that had received more than $13 million from Leo’s network of organizations
and whose executive director used to work for the Federalist Society.

(8/n)

But even as Currie proudly championed the bill, she would not know the full story behind it until after Roe fell more than five years later.

In an interview, she explained that she thought her vision for a 15-week cutoff,
rooted in her foundational story of the beating fetal heart,
had driven the plan.

No one had told her that A.D.F. had coordinated its strategy with Taylor before their meeting,
or that 15 weeks was part of its specific legal plan to undermine Roe, she said.

Or that Tseytlin had brainstormed this possibility at Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society cocktail hour
and advanced it at an upscale California resort alongside Republican leaders and attorneys.

When Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi signed the bill into law, with Currie smiling next to him,
it became the tightest restriction on abortion in the nation.

It made no exceptions for rape or incest, just a narrow provision to preserve the life of the woman or in cases of “severe” fetal abnormality.

Less than an hour later, Jackson Women’s Health Organization
— the Pink House
— filed a lawsuit through their attorneys at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Pink House performed abortions only until 16 weeks of pregnancy,
the center’s lawyers wrote,
and had done just 78 abortions when the fetus was identified as being 15 weeks or older in 2017.

Going after that small fraction, of course, was exactly the plan.

Not too early in pregnancy and not too late,
but exactly the line that might compel the Supreme Court to wade back into the subject of abortion.

“We were seeking to be incremental and strategic,” Taylor said.

Christian activists, he said, were learning to control their “moral passion” so as not to lose sight of their long-term goal.

There were still so many unknowns.

For the law to serve its intended purpose, anti-abortion activists needed a majority on the Supreme Court.

A.D.F. attorneys and their allies like Tseytlin had designed the legislation to target Kennedy,
but what they couldn’t foresee was that Kennedy would retire that summer,
allowing Trump to fill a second seat,
this time with Brett #Kavanaugh.

Now conservatives had a 5-4 split on the Supreme Court,
with Kavanaugh joining Roberts, Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch.

And there was more to come.

“As a Christian,” Currie said, “sometimes you don’t know God’s plan, and he kind of makes things happen.”

In her Virginia office just across the Potomac River from Washington,
Marjorie Dannenfelser, of the Susan B. Anthony List
(now known as Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America)
and the A.D.F. board,
had a detailed map drawn on a wall-size whiteboard.

From a distance, it looked like the kind used by political campaigns to track polling and turnout, swing districts and congressional votes.

But this one was color-coded to indicate states where Republicans held both the state legislature and the governor’s mansion
and was partitioned by circuit-court-of-appeals jurisdiction.

By early 2019, Republicans held complete control of state governments in 22 states,
giving them total power over abortion legislation.

Some 20 cases, with different legal strategies to gut Roe and Casey, were in litigation in lower courts.

A magenta triangle meant the state had passed a
“heartbeat bill,”
generally a ban that started around six weeks;
a green square signified a “pain-capable” abortion law,
typically a 20-week ban.

Red stars showed the federal appeals courts where judges nominated by Republicans outnumbered those nominated by Democrats
— of the 11 on the board, they controlled seven.

It was a map of how all the laws were moving up toward the ultimate court that mattered.

And now, on Sept. 18, 2020,
with the news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death,
Dannenfelser and her compatriots could capture another majority.

The kind of Supreme Court supermajority that could take down Roe.

(7/n)