The Daily: The Overturn Is Official

June 24, 2022

The big idea: It's official — Roe v. Wade is overturned

Sydney Harper, producer for The Daily, was dispatched to the Supreme Court steps to capture the response in the hours after the ruling.Sydney Harper

Roe v. Wade didn't live to see 50.

Today, a landmark Supreme Court ruling overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in America. In effect that means that millions of people, mostly in conservative states, will imminently lose access to that health care service.

Xavier Becerra, President Biden's health secretary, was at a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis today when the news broke that Roe v. Wade had been overturned. Missouri's "trigger law" kicked in, making abortion illegal in the state.

The clinic immediately stopped booking appointments.

In the afternoon, Mr. Becerra crossed the Mississippi River and traveled 13 miles to another Planned Parenthood clinic, in Illinois, where abortion is still legal. Dr. Colleen McNicholas, its chief medical officer, was suddenly swamped with requests from health care providers in other states who were begging her to take their patients.

The disparity was not lost on the visitor from Washington. "It's kind of embarrassing as an American," Mr. Becerra said in a telephone interview, "to say that I was about to leave a site where, from one moment to the next, women had lost their rights, and to go just across state lines where a woman in the same circumstances would still have that right."

With the decision, the United States joins a handful of countries, like Poland, Russia and Nicaragua, that have rolled back access to abortion in the last few decades. Nearly every other developed nation ensures access to abortion care — and offers universal health care to support women at all stages of pregnancy as well as children's health care after birth.

But today, the court decided to cement what was once a constitutional right as a political issue, subject to partisan polarization and patchwork provision. Representing the decision of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that it was time "to return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."

The three liberal justices, who dissented, wrote "with sorrow — for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection" that "one result of today's decision is certain: the curtailment of women's rights, and of their status as free and equal citizens."

Below, you can listen to our breaking coverage of the news from our colleagues in Opinion. Then, keep an eye on The Daily feed for a special episode about the ruling, coming soon.

LISTEN TO THIS

'We're Hurtling Into a Reactionary Future'

Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg, Times Opinion editor Lauren Kelley and the writer Leah Libresco Sargeant discuss what comes next with Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.

26:41 min

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Illustration by The New York Times; Photographs by The New York Times, Sydney Angel

'You Cannot Stop Abortions': Four Writers On the End of Roe v. Wade

Michelle Goldberg, Lauren Kelley and Leah Libresco Sargeant join Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss what comes next after Dobbs.

From The Daily team: Covering the Jan. 6 hearings

The control room at MSNBC's studio in New York City on the first night of the hearings, which aired during prime time.Sinna Nasseri

By Desiree Ibekwe

This week, the nine-member House select committee continued its investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The televised events have shed light on the details of a day that was the culmination of a campaign spanning months to delegitimize the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The Daily has followed the story of the attack from the very beginning.

In the immediate aftermath, we heard from reporters in and around the Capitol. "All of a sudden, I found myself in the fast-movie sea of the United States Senate," Nicholas Fandos, then a Times congressional correspondent, told us on our Jan. 7, 2021, episode, "not certain where we were going, not certain where the mob had entered the building." And since then, we have analyzed the reverberations from that day.

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So we wanted to share a playlist of episodes spanning the last year and a half — shows that have explored the political ramifications of the day, examined the mind-set of members of the mob and looked at the impact the attack had on the people present.