In 1976, just a few years after the Supreme Court handed down its opinion in Roe v. Wade, most Americans thought abortion should be legal in at least some circumstances.

Those numbers haven’t changed much over almost 50 years. Most Americans still believe abortion should be legal in most circumstances. But our politics have shifted dramatically. And with the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which effectively overturned Roe — reality has shifted as well. No longer is abortion protected at the federal level.

The decision comes at a polarized moment: Anti-abortion Democrats and pro-abortion rights Republicans are dwindling breeds. Why? One major reason is a deliberate, decades-long campaign on the right to overturn Roe v. Wade. Conservative attorneys brought cases that undermined Roe with the hope that, by chipping away at the ruling, Supreme Court justices would eventually feel comfortable striking it down.

The anti-abortion movement has also focused on building a pipeline of judicial nominees through organizations like the Federalist Society. The left, meanwhile, has focused on shifting party opinion on related issues like contraception coverage and the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits government funds from being used to pay for abortion except in the case of rape, incest, or endangering the mother’s life, while treating Roe as a largely settled matter.

Now, all those years of work by anti-abortion activists seem to be paying off. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, it has tossed out nearly 50 years of jurisprudence along with it. 

Over the decades, the ruling turned into one of the biggest lightning rods in American politics, and those years were punctuated by crucial moments. 

Here are the most significant.

1973: Roe v. Wade is decided. Justice Harry Blackmun writes the opinion, finding that people have a constitutional right to an abortion in the first and second trimester. He grounds that right in the 14th Amendment right to due process and an implied right to privacy.

1976: The Hyde Amendment passes for the first time. The measure prohibits government funds from being spent on abortion services except in cases of rape, incest, or threats to the life of the pregnant person. The provision exemplifies the kind of restrictions on abortion that the right continued to champion over the next five decades — and eventually draws the focus of the Democratic Party.

1978: James Bopp is named the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, the nation’s leading anti-abortion group. He becomes the architect of the strategy that looks set to succeed today: an “incremental” approach to slowly undermine Roe until, he hoped, the justices would eventually overturn it. Over the next four decades, Bopp helped states and localities draft abortion restrictions and, when those restrictions were challenged, defended them in the courts. Bopp also wrote the anti-abortion plank for the Republican Party platform in 1980. 

1980: A new alliance between Catholics and evangelicals, driven in part by opposition to abortion, helps Ronald Reagan capture the Republican nomination and, eventually, the presidency. It’s the first time abortion becomes a salient national political issue since Roe — and that’s in part because evangelical leaders saw it as a more politically palatable issue than their true concerns: maintaining segregation in schools. Still, the alliance, known as the Moral Majority, becomes a political force to be reckoned with for years to come, and elevates the anti-abortion cause and religious right.

1992: The Supreme Court decides Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, a case concerning state-level abortion restrictions in Pennsylvania. Roe survives, but in this first serious test for abortion rights since it was decided, the Court establishes new limits on the right. In a 5-4 decision, the Court declares that states can pass abortion restrictions as long as they don’t pose an “undue burden” on the pregnant person and replaces the trimester framework with a “viability” of the fetus standard. Following these new standards, the Court upholds most of Pennsylvania’s restrictions.

2006: Cecile Richards becomes the president of Planned Parenthood. It’s a deliberate move to select a leader suited to build the organization’s political power throughout the country and within the Democratic Party. Richards organizes the group’s local chapters and capitalizes on political events in 2010 and 2011 so that Planned Parenthood becomes a force in the Democratic Party — so much so that in 2012, the party included a declaration of support for Planned Parenthood in its platform.

2009: Dr. George Tiller, a Kansas abortion provider, is murdered while serving as an usher at his church. It’s the most extreme example of the rise in violent acts by anti-abortion activists.

2010: In March, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law. Because Obama needed the support of even anti-abortion Democrats to pass it, the bill included a compromise on abortion, the Boxer-Nelson Amendment. It allowed states to prohibit plans in the insurance marketplaces from covering abortion. President Obama also signed an executive order declaring that the Hyde Amendment applied to the ACA, and abortion rights activists responded by creating a coalition to defeat the Hyde Amendment. 

That fall, the Republican Party sweeps the midterm elections, due, in part, to backlash to the ACA and the rise of the Tea Party movement. The following year, states pass a record number of abortion restrictions.

2011: The US House passes an amendment by then-Rep. Mike Pence to defund Planned Parenthood. Though the amendment does not pass the Senate, it becomes a polarizing force between the parties.

Abortion rights organizations capitalize on the amendment and the Tea Party’s broader effort to defund and restrict abortion rights: Online gifts to Planned Parenthood increase by 500 percent, and NARAL’s email activist list grows by 1,000 subscribers per day at the height of the debate around Pence’s amendment.

2012: The DNC pushes an abortion rights message at the national convention. The organization includes a new paragraph in its party plank:

The President and the Democratic Party believe that women have a right to control their reproductive choices. Democrats support access to affordable family planning services, and President Obama and Democrats will continue to stand up to Republican efforts to defund Planned Parenthood health centers. The Affordable Care Act ensures that women have access to contraception in their health insurance plans, and the President has respected the principle of religious liberty. Democrats support evidence-based and age-appropriate sex education. 

2016: Due, in part, to the movement that started after the ACA in 2010, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders call for repealing the Hyde Amendment in their presidential campaigns that spring. The DNC eventually adopts that language for its party platform.

Come November, however, Donald Trump is elected president and effectively delegates judicial selection to the conservative Federalist Society. He nominates three Supreme Court justices during his term in office: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

2019: As laws that would ban abortions after the sixth week spread across the US, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden endorses the repeal of the Hyde Amendment on the campaign trail. As president, he will attempt to make good on his promise; his first budget proposal reversed the Hyde Amendment, though Congress, which ultimately holds the power of the purse, overrules him.

2020: Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies of cancer less than two months before the presidential election. Trump and the Republican Senate quickly confirm the Federalist Society-endorsed Barrett, giving conservatives a 6-3 supermajority on the Court and prompting anti-abortion groups to tee up state laws restricting abortion that would invite challenges and a showdown in the Supreme Court.

2021: Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case concerning a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks, is argued at the Supreme Court. The conservative litigants explicitly ask the Court to overturn Roe, and the justices indicate they are open to doing so.

2022: Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturning Roe in Dobbs is leaked to Politico in May, and in June the final decision was handed down, overturning both Roe and Casey. “… [T]he authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” the decision reads.

Update, June 24, 10:42 am ET: This story has been updated based on the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade. Click here for all Vox’s latest coverage of this decision and its implications for reproductive health in the US.

When we first met Janet Feldman, she was wearing pink shoes, a fuzzy pink sweater, and pink glasses.

“Nothing to do with breast cancer,” she told us, “I just love the color pink.”

Janet does have breast cancer, though. She’s had it for more than 10 years. She remembers the day, more than a decade ago, when a doctor told gave her the diagnosis. She was sitting in his office with her mother.

They had to make a decision about her care: Would she go private or public?

Janet lives near Melbourne, Australia, and Australia has a health care system that looks a little bit like the public option proposed by some US presidential candidates, including former Vice President Joe Biden and former Mayor Pete Buttigieg. In Australia, anyone can get care through the country’s public system. But if they want more flexibility or access to certain doctors, they can also purchase private insurance.

Janet had paid for private insurance. Her mother assumed that would be the better option, so she asked the doctor to recommend a good private hospital.

“He said, ‘No, no.’ He said, ‘Listen to me,”’ Janet remembered. “He said, ‘You’re gonna stay public.’”

Why would a doctor tell his patient not to use the private insurance she was paying for? And why would Australia maintain a private health care system if the public system is the one doctors tell patients to use?

Answers to these questions could tell us a lot about the future of the US health care system, especially if Biden or Buttigieg end up in the White House.

Listen to this episode of The Impact, Vox’s podcast about how policy reshapes people’s lives, for those answers:

Dylan Scott, a Vox policy reporter, went to Australia with The Impact’s Byrd Pinkerton to investigate the country’s public-private system. They met with doctors, researchers, patients — and even a robot — and returned to the US with evidence that could both hearten and concern candidates like public-private boosters Biden or Buttigieg.

A top executive at one of Australia’s biggest health insurance providers, Dwayne Crombie, agrees: Private insurance will need to be reformed if it’s going to survive. “The debate’s really about the timeframe for the death spiral,” he says.

At the same time, patients like Janet enjoy high-quality care in the public sector. The balance between public and private health care is hard to strike.

Further Reading

• Dylan’s piece on Australia’s hybrid health care system
• Stephen Duckett’s working paper on public and private insurance in Australia
• Dylan’s piece on the three different kinds of health care plans floated by the Democratic candidates
• Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy 

Subscribe to The Impact wherever you get your podcasts, including: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Megaphone

Hans-Josef Fell describes himself as a “solar freak.” His entire home, in a small town in Northern Bavaria, runs on renewable energy: heating, cooling, and electricity.

Fell installed his first solar panels in 1991, and though they cost him about $70,000 in today’s dollars, he considered them to be a worthwhile purchase to help fight climate change. At the time, most Germans either could not afford them or saw them as a losing financial investment. Fell realized he wanted to find a way to change that, so that his fellow countrymen would invest in renewable technology instead of fossil fuels.

As a Green party member in Germany’s national parliament, Fell eventually helped create a policy that looks a lot like part of the Green New Deal some Democrats are proposing in the US. His law allowed Germans to sell the renewable energy they create to the grid at a high fixed price — a price that would more than cover the cost of installing a solar panel, or investing in a wind turbine. Germany paid for this through a surcharge on every electricity consumer’s bill.

For this episode, The Impact partnered with NPR’s Planet Money to investigate the consequences of Germany’s green push. In some ways, the law succeeded beyond Fell’s wildest dreams. Demand for renewables grew so much in Germany that other countries, including China, started to mass-produce solar panels and wind turbines, which drove down prices. Now, people all over the world can afford this technology.

But the law has also had some unintended consequences. Because of amendments to the law and technological improvements, the surcharge on Germany’s electric bills have skyrocketed. Now, Germany has the highest electric bills in Europe. Electricity has become a burdensome expense for some Germans living on welfare, and the high cost has left a few spending a lot of time in the dark.

Further listening and reading: 

• Vox’s David Roberts on how government policy helped make solar technology affordable
• Roberts on how to solve the “solar duck curve” problem
• Roberts on California’s residential solar mandate
• Vox’s Umair Irfan and Tara Golshan on Sen. Bernie Sanders’s Green New Deal
• Vox’s guide to where all 2020 candidates stand on policy, including climate change issues.

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.

In 1974, Gerald Ford became president after some of the most difficult years in our country’s history.

In addition to Watergate and President Nixon’s resignation, the Vietnam War had divided the country for more than a decade. While millions of Americans served in Southeast Asia, many others protested the war at home — some of them by evading the draft. Ford wanted to find a way to bring the country back together. Just a few weeks after he took office, he announced a plan “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

For the young men convicted of draft evasion — a felony — during the Vietnam War, Ford promised, “I’m throwing the weight of my presidency into the scales of justice on the side of leniency.”

Ford gave those young men an opportunity to apply to a Clemency Board, a small group appointed by the president who would decide whether to erase that felony from the men’s records. Now, many of the Democratic candidates for president want to follow Ford’s model for a new group of people in federal prison: those convicted of nonviolent drug crimes.

In this episode, The Impact looks back on President Ford’s clemency plan through the lives of two men: one who fought in Vietnam and served on the Clemency Board, and one who evaded the draft. We explore how the Board transformed their lives and what it might mean for a new generation of young people behind bars.

Further listening and reading: 

• The Uncertain Hour’s third season explores the war on drugs and its aftermath
• Vox’s German Lopez on incarceration in America
• Vox’s guide to where 2020 candidates stand on policy, including criminal justice reform 
• Professor Mark Osler’s law review article on Ford’s Clemency Review Board.

Subscribe to The Impact on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app to automatically get new episodes of the latest season each week.