Like most Americans, I think abortion must remain legal—but with restrictions. I am conflicted about abortion because of things that happened in my own family, but when it comes to the law, let’s stipulate that over the half century that Roe kept abortion legal, even some of its defenders thought it might be a shaky decision—the product of judicial activism. They were right: Roe was the product of an activist Court. But then, so was Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

How, conservatives fume, can anyone argue that dumping Roe and “throwing it back to the states” is “activism”?

Here’s the answer: Years of political change matter. Decades ago, abortion became accepted as a right by a broad majority of the country. Justice Samuel Alito and the other five conservatives on the Supreme Court were not handing back abortion to the states as if it were some open question for a debate; they knew exactly what was going to happen in states with “trigger” laws the minute they ruled. Despite their legal rationale, these justices were taking sides in a culture war on behalf of a minority of Americans with whom at least some of them happen to agree.

Alito, in particular, had been strategizing for years about this single issue: As The New York Times reported, in 1985, before he was on the Court, Alito took “umbrage” at a judge’s comments that “forcing women to listen to details about fetal development before their abortions” would cause them emotional distress. “Good, [Alito] wrote: Such results ‘are part of the responsibility of moral choice.’” (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has written, “The cruelty is the point.”)