For years, the alliance between the antiabortion movement and the GOP has been a constant of American politics, one of the great success stories of collaboration between social movements and political parties.

Until recently, the partnership seemed only to make both sides stronger. But the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision last summer, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has profoundly altered the political context, revealing the deep unpopularity of the movement’s objectives. It constitutes both a crowning achievement for the decades-old marriage and what looks to be the start of an unprecedentedly turbulent period for it.

Jacobin’s Seth Ackerman spoke with Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr Professor of Law at the University of California, Davis, about the strategic dilemma the movement and its political allies face now that the abortion issue has been thrust back to the center of the US American political agenda.