Bringing the story up to the present, Chapter 7 considers how the breach between the two sides widened during battles about religious liberty and health care reform. In 2010, a backlash to President Barack Obama’s health care reform, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), helped to give Republican lawmakers control of most state legislatures. These members of the so-called Tea Party passed an unprecedented number of abortion restrictions. Pro-lifers also joined an attack on the contraceptive mandate of the ACA, arguing that the government had denigrated religious liberty. While pro-lifers accused Planned Parenthood of illegal and immoral actions, abortion-rights supporters described their opponents as misogynist opponents of health care and birth control. In 2016, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, the Court made claims about the costs and benefits of abortion yet more central to constitutional doctrine. With the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy two years later, many expected the Court to overturn Roe. But rather than seeking to appeal to ambivalent voters, antiabortion absolutists pushed strict abortion bans. For their part, abortion-rights supporters tried to expand abortion rights in the states. Decades of debate about the policy costs and benefits of abortion had pushed the two sides even further apart.

Exploring the period between 1980 and 1986, Chapter 3 studies how groups like NRLC and AUL refocused on overturning Roe. After 1978, when Akron, Ohio, passed a model law, NRLC and AUL lawyers contended that because abortion sometimes harmed women, incremental restrictions should be unconstitutional only if they unduly burdened women rather than helped them. The Supreme Court rejected abortion foes’ arguments in City of Akron v. Akron Center for Reproductive Health (1983), but writing in dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor adopted a version of the undue burden standard that pro-lifers championed. O’Connor’s dissent solidified mainstream pro-life groups’ commitment to a new strategy. Rather than prioritizing a constitutional amendment, abortion foes would gradually chip away at Roe, narrowing its protections and setting the stage for its overruling. By aligning with the GOP, pro-lifers would shape who sat on the Supreme Court. And in defending access restrictions, abortion foes would highlight their benefits – and what they saw as the costs of abortion.

This chapter considers when the government’s speech deprives its targets of life, liberty, or property in violation of the Due Process Clause. It starts with a brief tour of the government’s lies and other falsehoods, illustrating their wide array of audiences, topics, motives, and effects. It then examines the government’s speech that interferes with its listeners’ choices in ways that would violate the Due Process Clause if the government accomplished those same changes through its lawmaking or other regulatory action: examples include law enforcement officers’ lies that coerce their targets’ waiver of constitutional liberties and the government’s lies that deny their targets the ability to exercise reproductive or voting rights. Next, it turns to the expressive harms sometimes inflicted by the government’s speech, investigating whether the government’s speech that shames or humiliates its targets offends due process protections. Finally, it turns fromt the effects of the government's speech to its purposes, exploring whether the Clause limits the government’s speech motivated by its intent to interfere with protected liberties or to inflict injury.