BOOK REVIEW: Joanna N. ERDMAN on Roe: the history of a national obsession by Mary Ziegler (Comparative Legal History, XIII (2025), nr. 1 (June), pp. 173-179)

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Mary Ziegler wrote Roe: The History of a National Obsession at the start of 2022. By the year’s end, the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.

Yet for Ziegler, Roe was not – and has never been – simply a judicial decision that could be overturned. Roe ‘is a symbol of everything that divides us’ (xii). The us are activists, lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, judges and ordinary Americans who, for the last half-century, have used Roe as a symbol to express and to hold cultural differences and political disagreements, ambiguities, and even contradictions, over basic national values (xi). There is no overturning Roe because Roe has been turning and turning in a national obsession over the United States of America itself.

The chapters name these national values: democracy, liberty, and equality, with liberties of choice and religion, and equalities of gender, class and race, as questions of law, science, and justice. The chapters are written chronologically, punctuated by US Supreme Court judgments, when decade by decade, ideas about Roe were tested and challenged, accepted, dismissed, or simply never acknowledged. Yet again Ziegler does not let the court write this history. Narrative, not authority, structures the book. Roe is carried through time as a symbol of choice and coercion, judicial activism and restraint, scientific truth and perversion, social justice and neglect, religious liberty and strife. ‘When we talk about Roe, we contradict ourselves and one another’ (158). These contradictions only show the complexity of ideas about abortion, ideas which sometimes switched sides in political debates, debates that rarely reduced to two sides. Ziegler captures this ‘robust popular constitutional practice’ (158) in Roe as a cultural object of obsessive attachment and struggle, promise and provocation. Of course, as Roe travelled through time, Roe also travelled around the world and carried the contradictions of its meaning into comparative constitutional abortion law and politics, making this national history recognisable and relatable transnationally.

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DOI: 10.1080/2049677X.2025.2500221