“Today, we turn a page on Roe v. Wade.” Lynn Fitch, the attorney general of Mississippi, was standing on the steps of the Supreme Court rallying a group of pro-life activists and supporters. It was Dec. 1, 2021, the start of oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a Mississippi abortion law that put Fitch front and center in the case that would lead to Roe’s downfall after nearly a half-century of conservative efforts to do just that. “We are going to leave behind that false premise that for some reason, abortion is the answer to a level playing field for women. Our ability to succeed is not built on the death of innocent children, but our success is our own,” Fitch said, wearing a robin egg blue coat, with a slight Southern drawl and dimpled smile throughout. The crowd erupted in cheers.
Fitch’s optimism was vindicated on June 24, when the high court released its decision.
Fitch had told the Supreme Court that it was “an ideal vehicle” to resolve the issue of whether pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional. The conservative movement, focused on repealing Roe since the court legalized abortion in 1973, saw Dobbs as a chance to finally undo a moral wrong set within the framework of a hollow legal argument. The late Justice Antonin Scalia famously opined in Casey (1992) that Roe “fanned into life an issue that has inflamed our national politics in general.”
When Fitch took office in 2020, the Dobbs case was waiting for her. It was a challenge to Mississippi’s 2018 law, the Gestational Age Act. Fitch’s strategy was optimistic and straightforward: “We were blessed with an opportunity to petition for cert to the United States Supreme Court, which we did. We felt it was important when they took our case up to quickly go to the heart of Roe v. Wade.”
“I was elated when they took the case,” Fitch recalled.
A mere decade after “Jane Roe” pleaded with the Supreme Court to protect a pregnant woman’s ability to abort her baby legally, Lynn Fitch began a legal career in Mississippi that would set her on the course to challenge it. After nearly four decades in the public and private sector, the single mother of three became the state’s first Republican attorney general in well over a century.
Now, at 60 years old, the first-ever female attorney general of Mississippi brought a whole-cloth case against Roe. The Dobbs petition and subsequent briefs didn’t rest only on viability of the fetus; it targeted Roe’s role in preventing women from enjoying children, family, and a career. To Fitch, a world without Roe didn’t remove women’s rights — it expanded their opportunities. It was an uncommon argument, and Fitch was uniquely placed to make it.
“As we looked at this case, we realized that we had an opportunity to have a discussion about empowering women and promoting life together,” Fitch told the Washington Examiner magazine just days before the Supreme Court released its decision.
“We were able to have an honest dialogue in our briefs and in our oral arguments that we need to look at this from a holistic perspective,” Fitch explained. “The court in Roe was very condescending. We knew women could do much more than women gave us credit for. I mean, 50 years have passed. Times have changed. You have maternity laws, paternity laws, you have flexible opportunities for work. Things were very different. And we need to look at it from that perspective. So, that’s how we embraced our opportunity. We needed to have the conversation about truly empowering women and then truly being there to support the unborn, and those two could be merged together. You didn’t have to make a choice, either/or.”
Fitch believed it and lived it. Her mentor, Evelyn Gandy, was the Democratic lieutenant governor of Mississippi from 1976 to 1980 and the first woman elected to a statewide constitutional office in Mississippi. Fitch calls her three children and three grandchildren (a fourth is on the way) “an enhancement” to her life. “I was very fortunate. I had a great support network of my friends.”
Motherhood aside, this case may be the most monumental of Fitch’s career. She’s been praised and criticized for it. More than 140 friend-of-the-court briefs were filed in Dobbs, covering an array of arguments. Some reinforced Fitch’s holistic approach. Many, of course, castigated the pro-life view, particularly that it “empowers women.” Major media outlets tended to agree with these latter filers and made that clear to their audiences.
A bevy of social science experts submitted a brief saying “being denied a wanted abortion can have a detrimental impact on women’s mental health.” Seventy-three groups that advocate gender equality, led by the National Women’s Law Center, argued that the right to abortion is essential and overturning this right would “decimat[e] the ability of women and all who can become pregnant to pursue their personal and professional goals, to safeguard their economic security, and to stand as equal members of society.”
In Vanity Fair in September 2021, Bess Levin called the potential reversal of Roe “horrifying” and mocked Fitch’s claim that it would empower women. “Ya hear that, ladies? You can have it all, minus the right to choose. An amazing life is just around the corner, as soon as you give birth to, raise, and pay for a child the government insists you have,” she wrote.
Others took direct aim not at Fitch personally but at her state. “The fact is: Mississippi remains a dangerous and difficult place to bear, birth, and raise a child for lower-income parents. And the Supreme Court can only embrace Fitch’s fantastical thinking by denying this brutal reality,” wrote Jonathan Allen and Mark Joseph Stern for Slate in September 2021. “At every stage of pregnancy, life is difficult for Mississippians who are not wealthy,” the authors maintained. They said Mississippi was the only “state with no law guaranteeing equal pay for equal work.”
Mississippi does have the highest percentage of children living in poverty, and 75% of those live in homes headed by women; fatherlessness is common. That has raised the critique that Republicans have failed to support mothers while trying to outlaw abortion.
In response, Fitch points to the fact that she launched an awareness campaign to help Mississippians spot the signs of human trafficking, implemented a unique educational program in Mississippi schools to teach financial literacy, and supported ways to enforce child support better as a member of the RNC Platform Committee back in 2016. Further, after reading a newspaper article about wages in Mississippi several years ago while she was the state treasurer, Fitch tasked a local economist with determining the state’s wage gap. After seeing the discrepancy in figures, Fitch set out to promote a bill that would narrow the wage gap between men and women.
Vivian Dailey, a retired school principal in Mississippi, met Fitch 15 years ago through the Mississippi Federation of Republican Women. The two women, among others, worked on the equal pay issue for “at least eight or nine years,” Dailey recalled. “It would pass the House, then not the Senate,” Dailey said. “And then, vice versa.” Apparently, some in Republican leadership were afraid such a bill would offend the business community. “Lynn had all of the statistics. She knew why we needed this for women. She was so well-versed on why we needed equal pay,” Dailey told the Washington Examiner magazine.
This spring, the legislature passed and the governor signed the Mississippi Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. This next session, Fitch plans on asking the Mississippi legislature to tackle ways to make childcare more affordable.
The Supreme Court, of course, has only strengthened her case for such policy.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his majority opinion.
A staff member at the attorney general’s office who worked closely on the Dobbs case acknowledges the effort that went into oral arguments as well as the controversial result: “We’ve always felt good about the arguments. We’ve also understood it’s very controversial and ignites a lot of passions on both sides.” Now, it appears, one long fight is over and another, the battle to set and defend state abortion laws in a post-Roe legal atmosphere, has begun.
“Democracy is messy by design, but it is our system,” the staffer said. “That’s as it should be. We always emphasized that it’s hard. It’s going to be hard,” but “it’s the right thing.”
As for Fitch, the work ahead of her is not unlike what she has been championing for the past 40 years. How should conservatives approach women who are unexpectedly pregnant or feel afraid?
“We have to speak to these women with humility and hope,” Fitch said. “We have to look at this at every angle. How crisis pregnancy centers can be there and be resourceful. How our faith communities can be engaged. We asked the court to give us this opportunity. We’re ready for the job.”
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
