One Year in a Post-Roe America

The stories you don't hear, the losses you can't measure

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

Saturday marked a dark anniversary: One year after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended the era of safe and legal abortion for American women.

Abortions are still happening. Health providers in progressive states are scaling up care, while abortion funds are working their tails off to help women in need get to where they need to be. Feminist networks have worked hard to get abortion pills into the hands of anyone who need them, regardless of legality.

But still: Even the most effective feminist activism cannot solve all of the problems that crop up when abortion is a crime.

In the last year, we’ve seen the tip of that iceberg of devastation. Pregnant women in the midst of miscarriages and serious medical emergencies have been refused care because their fetuses still had a heartbeat; dozens if not hundreds of them have been sent home or refused a full range of treatment because of abortion bans. Many of those same women developed serious life-threatening infections. Some nearly died, and now live in pushed-to-the-brink bodies; their lives may be shorter as a result. Some lost their uteruses or other reproductive organs. Women with badly-wanted pregnancies who received terrible news from a scan have been told they must continue their pregnancies anyway, with fetuses that will never live and who pose a significant physical risk to the woman carrying them. Many of these women are speaking out and telling their stories. Many more suffer in silence.

But then there are the more mundane stories we don’t hear, that have arguably bigger impacts: The thousands of women who are forced into becoming parents, who would have chosen abortion were it legal and accessible.

Feminists often say that abortion bans don’t prevent abortion, and that’s true. There is no correlation, globally, for where abortion rates are high and where abortion is legal. In fact, countries that ban abortion tend to have higher abortion rates than those where it’s legal. That’s not because outlawing abortion creates the need for abortions; it is because countries that outlaw abortion also tend to be hostile to women’s rights and reproductive rights in a series of other ways, all of which conspire to increase rates of unintended and unwanted pregnancies. Countries where abortion is legal tend to be more progressive, developed, wealthier nations with robust healthcare systems and, by extension, widespread access to contraception, and a cultural norm of using it. The big difference isn’t in abortions; it’s in unintended pregnancies. Where rates of unintended pregnancies are extremely high, abortion rates are high as well, whether abortion is legal or not. Where rates of unintended pregnancies are low but abortion is legal, a higher proportion of unintended pregnancies are terminated, but because relatively few pregnancies are unintended in the first place, overall abortion rates are lower.

So that’s an important caveat: Abortion bans do not correlate with lower abortion rates, but abortion bans are effective at preventing many abortions. Abortion bans are universally pushed by misogynists who offer little other support for women who are seeking to prevent pregnancy or seeking a future of their choosing, and so this confluence of factors leads to a ton of pregnancies that come to various ends, and because so many of these pregnancies in abortion-hostile nations are unwanted, abortion is one of the more common ends.

But for all of the women who end pregnancies when it’s legal, there are many more who carry to term against their will.

These are the stories we don’t often hear, because, well, they are difficult and uncomfortable and too often treated as shameful. Human beings are remarkably adaptable; even when forced or coerced into bad circumstances, we adjust and make do and if we’re lucky, we thrive. Most women who are unable to get abortions and are forced to carry to term wind up loving their kids; I am sure many or most would say, many years later, that they cannot imagine their lives without the child or children they were forced to have. Most of these women are good, loving mothers, or try their best to be.

But all of them were forced to walk a path they didn’t choose. Every single one paid a price: Their health, their dreams, their physical safety, their ability to provide for their families, their futures. Some never got to look back at what could have been, because the cost of a pregnancy they didn’t want but were forced to carry was their life.

Every abortion refused is a woman’s life pushed down an unwanted path.

At the individual level, people adjust. On the aggregate, though, this means a critical mass of missing women: Women missing from high school and college classrooms; women missing from workplaces; women missing from the arts; women missing from their children’s lives. It means women missing the ability to leave abusers, missing the luck of meeting the great love of their life, missing the chance to be fully present with their kids. It means art never made, much-desired children never born, safety never found, stability never realized, loves that never blossomed, achievements never reached.

It also means children who suffer, whether we’re talking about children whose births were unwanted or children whose lives were made poorer because their mother got pregnant and was forced to carry another child to term. We have research on what happens to the kids of mothers forced into subsequent childbearing: They are more likely to grow up in poverty. They are more likely to grow up with a mother tied to an abusive man. They are more likely to be evicted and find themselves homeless. They are less likely to have a father figure in the picture. They show worse child development. The children forced on their mothers may see poorer maternal bonding than the children those same mothers chose to have. And all children of women forced to give birth, whether they were already born or the children that woman was forced to carry, are more likely than the children of women who could get legal abortions to wind up orphaned. Because we know this: Abortion bans mean women die.

The things we miss when women are forced to carry pregnancies to term all exist in a black hole of what-could-have beens, a universe of alternate futures where many more women are healthier, and better able to provide for themselves and their children, and more in control of their lives. It is an alternate future in which more women graduate high school, graduate college, escape abusive men, claw their way out of poverty, find stable housing, are home in time to read their kids bedtime stories, have babies when they’re ready, make art, fall in love, find their way.

When abortion is outlawed, all of us suffer, because all of us miss out on what women could have done if their lives weren’t made smaller and harder and poorer. And women in particular suffer: When women as a class are consigned to the primary role of child-bearer, are not trusted with our own bodies, and forced off the paths we hoped to walk, we wind up in a world with fewer free women — fewer women in positions of power over their own lives, let alone in power more broadly; fewer women in the public sphere; fewer women in school; fewer women able to work their way up whatever ladder they are on. And a world with fewer free women means that all women, even those lucky enough to avoid forced childbearing, live in a place ruled by misogyny, and where women are disrespected and forced into submission by law.

But the people who miss out the most of all are the women who were already teetering on the edge, or living on the other side of it. Women of means may not always be able to get abortions either, especially if they are young, or if their means comes from a not-great man, or if the abortion they need is a medically necessary one; no one is safe when abortion is a crime. But women with the fewest means and the scarcest resources are in the worst circumstances — they are often the women for whom a forced birth will be maximally destabilizing and maximally dangerous, and for whom forced birth is the most likely outcome if they live where abortion is a crime.

In much of America, abortion is a now crime. And all those alternate futures and what-ifs become harder and harder to see when we’re stuck in the what-is of forced birth and no choice.

xx Jill

p.s. I wanted to pass on a few readings I think are particularly powerful this week.

• The first is Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day newsletter, which documents the toll abortion bans are taking on American women every day. It’s a depressing but necessary read, and well worth a subscription.

• Irin Carmon’s profile of a former abortion provider in Alabama is also a crucial read. It’s just devastating, and enraging, and shows in stark human terms what abortion bans really cost.

• And finally, Bryce Covert wrote about one of those stories we too often don’t hear: A woman denied an abortion, and what happened to her next.