After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, some women are reconsidering their plans, including where they live, and wondering how best to channel their anger.
CHICAGO — Countless women wept. Some spent the weekend burning white-hot with rage, commiserating with friends and mothers and sisters. Many were fearful, recognizing the feeling of a freedom being taken away and thinking to themselves: This could only get worse.
Millions of American women spent the past five days absorbing the news that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade, erasing the constitutional right to a legal abortion that had held for nearly a half-century.
The decision instantly reordered the lives of women across the country.
Some women, especially conservative Christians, reveled in the decision as a moral and legal victory. But a poll released on Sunday revealed that a sizable majority of women in the United States — 67 percent — opposed the court’s ruling to overturn Roe, and 52 percent of Americans said it was a step backward for the nation.
For women who had sought abortions in states where clinics were forced to shutter, the ruling was an immediate catastrophe, jeopardizing their decision to terminate their pregnancies.
Yet the decision reached far beyond them — across generations and geography, across race and class. Many women were sent spinning, questioning their place in society, at least in the eyes of the Supreme Court.
In dozens of interviews this week, American women who support abortion rights recalled the moment when they heard that Roe had been overturned, and the waves of shock and fury that followed. They reflected on how access to legal abortion had quietly undergirded their personal decisions, even if they had never sought one themselves. They worried that the progress many women have made since abortion was legalized — in education, the workplace and in the culture — would be halted.
And they reconsidered their own plans and those of their children: whether they should live, work or attend colleges in states where abortion has been banned, how they could help other women with unwanted pregnancies, and whether they would ever recover the constitutional right to receive a safe abortion, a guarantee that tens of millions of women have known their entire lives.
“It’s been quite disorienting, in terms of our humanity,” said Jennifer Solheim, 47, who teaches literature at the University of Illinois Chicago. “It is disorienting to realize that you’ve had a basic right taken away.”
‘My jaw is clenched all day, every day’
In May, a draft opinion on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case was leaked to the public, making clear that a majority of the Supreme Court was poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision.
Still, when the Dobbs ruling was officially released last week, the blow was heavy for Kristen Coggins, a 36-year-old mother of three girls in Charlotte, N.C. She felt a “deep river of anger,” she recalled, “an undercurrent in my body that just couldn’t come to the surface.”
“As a Black woman, I start to wonder what’s next for people who look like me — if you can take things away from white women, then you would definitely take things away from us,” she said. “My anxiety is way up. My jaw is clenched all day, every day.”
When Marie Pavlich, a marketing executive in Chicago, got the notification on her phone, she was not surprised, having steeled herself for the decision. But the news still hit her like a punch, a physical reaction that was followed by despair.
“I was so sad, so angry and just feeling out of control, feeling helpless,” she said. “One little ding on your phone and all of a sudden, that thing you’ve assumed is going to be there forever is gone. Even if you knew the drop of the roller coaster was coming, it was still shocking to feel the drop.”
In rural Wessington Springs, S.D., Kate Schmidt, 41, a social studies teacher, expressed her feelings partly by rage gardening.
“I was angry, just taking my aggression out on the weeds,” she said.
The ruling cleared the way for a state ban that made abortion completely illegal in South Dakota, with no exceptions for rape and incest. In anticipation of the ruling, the state’s only abortion clinic stopped providing abortions weeks ago.
“I’m so upset that we’ve basically been reduced to incubators,” Ms. Schmidt said. “I’m 41, I’m past having kids, but there is a 30-year-old down the street that might find herself with an issue or the 18-year-old in my classroom that might find herself with an issue, or the 14-year-old. And why shouldn’t they have a choice?”
The news was especially grim for low-income women, who account for about three-quarters of abortion patients and are likely to face the steepest financial challenge to travel if abortion becomes illegal where they live.
“It’s hard enough for rural women to find health care and housing,” said Stephanie Isaacs, 30, a tenant organizer in Shelbyville, Tenn., who has held a series of low-wage jobs like hospital attendant and school cafeteria worker since graduating high school. “This is like the straw that’s supposed to break us.”
‘Something that’s just a fact of life’
Jodi Ealy, 29, of Little Rock, Ark., is the exception among women in her family: She is the only one who has not had an abortion.
“It’s always just been something that’s just a fact of life,” Ms. Ealy said.
And for her family members, she said, “It was always the right decision for every woman. I just don’t think it’s fair to take that away.”
After last week’s Supreme Court ruling, many women were spurred to examine their own experiences and that of their families, regardless of whether they had ever had an abortion. According to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights, one in four women will have an abortion by the age of 45.
Ms. Coggins, of Charlotte, recalled a chilling detail from a family history, told to her by her aunt: In Buffalo, a great-aunt performed several abortions with a wire hanger for women in her neighborhood who needed them, long before Roe granted the right to a legal abortion.
In Pennsylvania, Judith Saylor, a 77-year-old dressmaker, remembered that for years she had rented rooms to female students at what is now Millersville University, and said that scores became part of a family she is still in touch with. Several, she recalls, got pregnant and chose to have abortions.
“One of them, I went with her to get an abortion,” she said. “It was a very traumatic time, but she wouldn’t have made another decision. Twenty years later, she feels right with her decision.”
The abortion conversations — and the impact of the Supreme Court ruling — have seeped into unexpected places.
Aboard a retired tugboat docked in Red Hook, Brooklyn, Carolina Salguero found herself doing something she had never done. Hours after the decision, she posted about two abortions she had earlier in her life. Ms. Salguero, who runs a nonprofit group to promote maritime industries, has long been outspoken on neighborhood and work issues, but never on something so personal.
“With this, there’s no such thing as private,” she said. “You’re not able to make private decisions — the state can take that out of your hands. So what’s private?”
‘This will now be the next generation’s fight’
After Roe was overturned, many women asked themselves a simple question: What do we do now?
Lincoln, Neb., seemed like a wonderful place to live to Jessica Versaw, 33. It is a college town where she has a supportive network of family and friends. But since the decision, she has spent much of her time contemplating what a post-Roe world means for Nebraska.
Now, Ms. Versaw, a software designer, is entertaining the idea of moving out of the state. Abortion is still legal, but Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican, has said he will move to ban it, even in cases of rape.
“We thought it was enough to live somewhere that’s this blue dot in a red state,” she said. “But if the state is going to leave us behind, then we will leave it.”
Abbey Ragain, a 23-year-old in Lincoln, said she had heard from friends in other states where abortion access had been threatened or banned, and was even more determined to fight a similar move in Nebraska.
“We aren’t working towards a future, or living in a state that protects existing lives,” she said.
Emily Ross, a 33-year-old project manager in a manufacturing plant in Greensburg, Pa., did not consider herself politically active before. But now she feels compelled to volunteer for a political campaign, trying to elect a Democratic governor in the fall election. If Roe could be overturned, would the Supreme Court take on contraception next — even the morning-after pill?
“I’m really concerned about what the future could be, because this is Step 1,” she said. “I don’t care what anyone says: There are a lot of liberties we thought we had, and I don’t think they will exist come five years from now unless we make serious changes.”
For many women, their thoughts have turned to their children. There is grief, said Destiny Lopez, a reproductive rights advocate in North Carolina, in the realization that “this will now be the next generation’s fight.’’
The ruling only deepened the desire for Yolanda Williams, 42, who runs a parenting podcast, to continue her plans with a group of women to buy rural land in Georgia and live communally with their children. She has considered whether they should live in a state where abortion could soon be severely restricted, but is unsure which corner of the country could be better.
“There’s really no safe place, if we’re being honest, for women,” she said. “There’s different states that have different abortion laws. But at the end of the day, being a Black woman with a disabled child who is also a girl, there is really no place safe.”
Noelle Buttry, 52, of Little Rock, said she bought Plan B, the emergency contraception known as the morning-after pill, for her children in case they need it while living in Arkansas, where abortion is now banned in most cases. But she also knows they are not the ones most at risk.
“My kids are very aware that they’re very privileged, and if they need an abortion or have a health care crisis and need to go to another state, we have the resources to do that,” she said. “It’s the people that don’t that we’re so concerned about.”
In the Atlanta suburbs, Claire Mills, 58, said she worried for her two daughters, who are 31 and 20, particularly her younger daughter, who is studying astrophysics in a state without abortion access.
Even harder to fathom is that her children could be living without the protections that Ms. Mills had during her own adolescence and adulthood.
“It took 50 years for them to overturn Roe,” she said. “How much time do we have to get it back?”
Reporting was contributed by Amy Harmon, Trip Gabriel, Anne Barnard, Amanda Holpuch, Erica Sweeney, Sean Keenan, Lauryn Higgins and Ann Hinga Klein.
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