A n event that ruined lives, degraded the citizenship of hundreds of millions, and permanently lowered the status of American women came and went four years ago, and American politics seems to have largely moved on. When the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022’s Dobbs decision, it fulfilled a decades-long project of the American right and made real a nightmare for women’s health and equality that feminists had dreaded for a generation. In the months that followed, protests were sporadic and largely moot: popular will, it had long become clear, had little bearing on abortion policy. Women began giving birth to babies they did not want, and dropping out of school and work to care for them – wasting their talents and abandoning their dreams. A flurry of court cases negotiating the impact of the court’s ruling in states across the country made abortion legal, then illegal, then legal again, then illegal again, with women’s ability to control their own lives flickering on and off like a dying lightbulb.…