Rachel Barkow: I think it’s important not to let despair or anger turn to hopelessness. The anti-choice movement spent 50 years pushing for this movement, and they never gave up even when it looked like the odds against them were impossible to beat. The pro-choice movement needs the same resolve. One strategy is to follow the anti-choice model and seek to change court personnel until Dobbs is overruled and Roe is once again the law of the land. But given the age of the justices, that will be a long game, unless there are unforeseen changes to the court’s size, which seem unlikely given what President Biden and the Senate Democrats have said. So that means the action will be in Congress and in the states—in state legislatures and state courts, seeking constitutional protection under state constitutions. Hopefully this will get people to see how important the selection of state high court judges is and will get them more involved in state-level politics as well.

In addition to these legal avenues, a great deal of energy will need to be devoted to helping people who need safe abortions get access to them, either through the support of abortion funds or other support networks.

Noah Rosenblum: I think we need to think about this in the short term and the long term. In the short term, those of us committed to sex equality and the protection of access to abortion will need to think about how we can use the tools we have, including, as Rachel said, state law and state courts, to make good on those commitments. I also think we should prepare for greater legal conflict, both between the states and between the branches of government, than we have seen in many years, as has happened at other moments of intense social and political disagreement in American history.

In the longer term, we need to recognize that Dobbs was the result of a systematic effort by the conservative legal movement to build and exercise power, both judicial and political. We have to think about how to build and exercise a countervailing power. I see much promise in the fact that many of the positions pushed by the conservative legal movement have only ever enjoyed the support of a minority of Americans. Meanwhile, large majorities of Americans continue even now to disapprove of the government interfering in the decisions a woman makes about her pregnancy. There is a political constituency here to be organized and brought to power that could change the country’s direction again.