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This article is an excerpt from Killers of Roe: My Investigation Into the Mysterious Death of Abortion Rights by Amy Littlefield, published by Hachette Book Group copyright © 2026. Reprinted by permission of publisher.

One June day I wound my way up a lush hillside in Simi Valley, California, where the fortieth president of the United States sat grinning at me from atop a horse. Ronald Reagan looked dapper and relaxed, his toned body a leathered green-brown. Somehow, his teeth gleamed white. How can a statue’s teeth look white? I wondered as I pulled my rental car into the packed parking lot. But if anyone’s teeth could remain white in death, it was the handsome actor-president’s. Vultures circled above the dead president’s head. Perhaps they sensed the legacy of bloodshed here at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum.

I made my way through the lush courtyard of a Spanish-style estate and grabbed an audio guide from a woman dressed in a red blazer like an old-time movie-theater usher. Then I learned that the first exhibit I would be subjected to in this cursed place was a hologram of Ronald Reagan himself. Sweat beaded on the audio guide in my hand. I remembered, too late, the warnings of the abortion opponents I’d already spoken to as part of my investigation into the death of abortion rights for my book, Killers of Roe. Hell was real after all. It was right here, in an air-conditioned mansion in the hills of Southern California.

It happened to be the week of Juneteenth, the federal holiday marking the end of slavery, so I tried to distract myself from the impending apparition by taking note of the people around me — Asian tourists, German tourists. What kind of person, I wondered, chose this time of year to visit a museum dedicated to a man who ran his first campaign for governor in 1966 after coming out against fair housing and the Civil Rights Act, praised the formerly segregated Bob Jones University as a “great institution” when it still had an interracial dating ban, promoted the sole holdout in the Supreme Court decision against Bob Jones University’s tax-exempt status to chief justice, called African delegates to the United Nations “monkeys,” used the racist stereotype of the “welfare queen” to distort how we think about Black and poor women forever, and alienated Black people to such an extent that he won only 9 percent of African American voters upon his second election in 1984?

Who else was here in hell, besides a feminist reporter trying to force herself to take deep breaths in case there was a special room for Commie sympathizers? The answer was: A lot of people. The place felt packed, even by the standards of an institution that, at least before the pandemic, saw up to 1,500 visitors on an average day. Parents had brought their kids to see the “Star Wars” exhibit — a mash-up of memorabilia from the movies and Reagan’s nuclear missile defense system. Tourists were getting their pictures taken outside the 1980s-era Air Force One with its startling........

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