Another Year Without Roe

January 22, 2024

Dear Meteor readers,

Today is the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade—the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion. As you know, Roe was the law of the land until 2022, when SCOTUS ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health that abortion is not a right “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history or tradition.”

Since then, we’ve seen exactly what life without Roe looks like for the birthing population of the United States. We’ve met women forced to become walking coffins for their untenable pregnancies; seen the rise of fetal personhood laws, which restrict pregnant people’s rights; and listened to the stories of providers terrified to be prosecuted simply for wanting to give vital medical treatment.

At The Meteor, we’ve been proud to tell those stories, and are committed to continuing to do so. Here are five from the last year—all of which paint a picture of what we’ve lost, and how patients and providers are fighting back.

Sincerely,

Samhita Mukhopadhyay

When Pregnancy is Criminalized by Neda Toloui-Semnani

Lauren Smith thought she knew what to expect as she was rushed into the operating room. At 26, it was her third cesarean section.

“I don’t remember much before or after because everything moved so fast,” she says. “I remember crying. I remember being cold and being wheeled in there, and then, laying back, and then, I remember looking at the clock. It was at an angle.” The surgeon cut her open and pulled out a squirming infant, a baby girl Smith would name Audrey. Delivered a month early, she was a strong, healthy, kicking-screaming, six-pound, five-ounce newborn.

Smith thought she knew what would come next. But like a character in a Kafka tale, her world had shifted while she slept.

If you’d asked Allie Phillips last year whether she’d consider running for office, she would have given you a quick “no.” But that was before a series of events gave her a front-row seat to just how little Republican politicians understand about women’s lives. Back in March, the 28-year-old Tennessee mom and home daycare worker had gone viral on TikTok for sharing her gut-wrenching abortion experience: At her routine 19-week anatomy scan, she’d found out that her daughter, whom she’d already named Miley Rose, had severe fetal anomalies and would not survive outside the womb. Her doctors told Phillips that continuing the pregnancy would put her at risk, but because of Tennessee’s strict abortion ban, they couldn’t help her. She’d have to find another way.

When the Dobbs v. Jackson decision dropped, it had an immediate impact on the lives of millions of people—particularly those in the South, where trigger laws swiftly went into effect in Kentucky and Louisiana, then Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi; abortion is now banned with few exceptions.

And with that, patients found themselves turning to an unlikely place: Florida.

When Nancy Davis, 36, found out she was pregnant last summer, she was so happy that she danced around her home with her fiancé and two children to celebrate. “It was like a party,” she told The Meteor’s Tara Abrahams. But at her 10-week checkup, an anatomy scan showed that the fetus Davis was carrying was developing without a skull. “The top of the head was completely gone,” she says. The prognosis was grim: If Davis tried to carry her pregnancy to term and deliver, doctors warned that the child would die within minutes. She needed an abortion.

One after another, we’ve read awful stories of patients being rushed to the ICU with sepsis, nearly bleeding out in bathrooms, or having to go out of state for abortions when their fetuses don’t have skulls.

Amid all this news, it can be hard to pinpoint a bright spot, but there is one: Support for abortion has repeatedly won elections. In what would have otherwise been a sleepy off-year of races, voters were so furious about their rights being taken away that they re-elected a Democrat as Governor in Kentucky, codified abortion in Ohio, and flipped a chamber in Virginia, blocking a ban there. What can we expect this election year as we officially enter our second year without Roe?