In one of her final interviews, the Supreme Court justice and women's rights pioneer predicted that US abortion rights could be revoked and warned the poorest would pay the price.

"People should care about [Roe v Wade] the way they did when many women didn't have access, didn't have the right to choose," warned US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a BBC interview in 2019.

The pioneering lawyer and feminist icon was speaking to BBC journalist Razia Iqbal on stage in The New York Public Library, in what would prove to be one of her last interviews. She would die the following year at the age of 87.

Smartly dressed and diminutive, but noticeably frail after having survived several bouts of cancer, Ginsburg stressed that US women's reproductive rights were already under threat and implored Americans to be vigilant, especially to the country’s poorest women. Abortion remains a hugely contested issue in the US, with 2022 data from the Pew Research Center showing that 61% of Americans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 37% think it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Ginsburg cautioned against the idea of thinking that the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which declared abortion was a constitutional right, was enough to guarantee women's reproductive freedom. Ginsburg was a lifelong staunch advocate for abortion rights and gender equality, but from her early days she had criticised the Supreme Court's handling of the abortion issue.

She believed that the Roe v Wade case had based the right to abortion on the wrong argument, a violation of a woman's privacy rather than on gender equality. This, she thought, left the ruling vulnerable to targeted legal attacks by anti-abortion activists.

Ginsburg felt that because the ruling had legalised abortion overnight nationwide, it had failed to resolve the issue. It had the effect of halting the political process that had been moving to liberalise abortion already – with advocates now believing that right was secure – and instead mobilised the anti-abortion movement.

"One of the things that happened after Roe v Wade is that women wanted women to be able to control their own destiny. They won, so they retreated. And the other side geared up and we have the situation that we have today," she told the BBC.

While the Roe v Wade ruling gave US women an absolute right to an abortion in the first three months (trimester) of pregnancy, it allowed for individual states to impose restrictions in the second trimester and to ban the procedure in the third. In the years that followed, anti-abortion rulings gradually began to chip away at access, and by the time Ginsburg was speaking, more restrictive abortion laws were already in effect in several states, while dozens more had proposed similar bills in their legislatures.

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