Fear and Anger in a post-Roe America
CW: Brief discussion of sexual assault.
I was 19 when I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome. As I neared the summer after my first year of college, in a tiff with my dad about whether he should let my boyfriend stay the night and the paternal concerns surrounding that, I more or less blurted out that I wasn’t sure that I could even get pregnant. That at 19, I had never had a period. That I likely needed to see a doctor because this probably wasn’t a good sign. He agreed, and scheduled an appointment for the same day he had one coming up.
I remember explaining to the doctor they had me see, a nice older woman with a soft voice who seemed almost at odds with her officer ranking in the Air Force, my symptoms, my concerns. She took notes, asked me a few questions, made mention of my weight, my deeper voice, my sideburns. She had some ideas, but would need some blood tests to help narrow things down, as well as an ultrasound. “We can draw the blood tests today, get you referred for the ultrasound, and schedule a follow up in a couple weeks.”
19 vials of blood turned out to be what she ordered. I remember my dad also needing some blood work done, so we met up and walked over to the testing counter to get vial labels printed. He only needed a couple, and watched another printer drone on and on and on. “I’d hate to be that person,” he chuckled. “That person is me,” I replied, staring at the ever growing pile of labels. “Oh,” was all he could respond with at the time.
Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, or PCOS. I had never heard of it before. “It’s surprisingly common, many women exhibit symptoms of it, and many don’t actually have the cysts, which you don’t,” the doctor said as reassuringly as she could. Her soft, kind voice, telling me mine was driven by a testosterone imbalance, causing me all sorts of issues. “In addition to that you grow unwanted facial hair and your body hair in general, your weight issues, your voice, this testosterone spike is also essentially destroying viable egg cells before they even get the chance to go anywhere.” Can’t have a period if you don’t have egg cells traveling out of your ovaries. Can however has gnarly sideburn and chin hair potential if your testosterone is several times higher than the average cis woman’s. At least there was a diagnosis, and an effective, simple treatment option consisting of the birth control pill and metformin. However, I’d always be dealing with the bigger symptoms. “Your weight will likely be high, because your PCOS is also driven by an excess of insulin. The unwanted hair, at best only laser hair removal will truly deal with it. Your voice will stay fairly deep, your breasts on the smaller side.” Bummers all around. But one thing really stuck out, even to college me. “Having biological children yourself will be tricky. Not impossible, but very risky, even with medical help. You’d have to stop the pill of course, but your testosterone will go back up without the estrogen around to balance it. You’ll likely have miscarriages, assuming you even get a pregnancy to stick.” She went on with other pregnancy related risks, and apologized for them. It wasn’t her fault, she was just the bearer of bad news. Granted, at 19, the idea of having a hard time getting pregnant seems awesome. The problems she listed would be issues for older me to handle.
I’m now in my early 30s. I am in a loving and stable marriage. Our debts are minimal, and we even have a house. Over the years, we had talked about how our likely options for if and when we had kids were going to be surrogacy or adoption, both great and wonderful but expensive and lengthy processes. I was lucky he understood my situation, happy it wouldn’t crumple our marriage down the line.
We live in Texas.
Now, for the most part, I actually like Texas. Texas the place is much, much different from Texas the state’s GOP party’s presentation to the rest of the country. It’s diverse, it’s full of culture and history, it’s beautiful, it’s humid but I can deal. But all of these positives didn’t stop me from being regularly worried about the idea of what trying for biological children in this state would potentially mean for me so long as the state’s GOP runs things. Even before Roe was outright overturned, I fretted about it. And now, it’s no longer a choice I feel I have.
Assuming I could even get pregnant naturally, or spent a fortune on IVF without also springing for a surrogate and have at least one egg stick (assuming IVF and other treatments aren’t side casualties in a post-Roe America), for my body to carry a child to term would be, as aforementioned, risky at best. My womb would be inhospitable as my testosterone levels wreak havoc on my pregnant uterus. I’d likely be miserable beyond the average pregnancy misery, maybe even deathly sick. The fetus might never reach viability, a miscarriage highly likely. A child my spouse and I wanted, never being born. And then, unless I was willing to pay to travel, I would be forced to carry this unviable fetus to term. At risk for legal trouble for this miscarriage I didn’t want to have. Having to bear both the emotional toll of knowing I would give birth to the dead remnants of what would have been a child we wanted and worked so hard to have as well as any physical damage resulting from keeping a mass of rotting cells inside me for months. The very real risk of my spouse not just losing our long shot attempt at a baby, but also me in the process. And if I did travel to get an abortion? In addition to everything surrounding the travel and procedure itself, I run the risk of being taken to court, sued, financially ruined because I dared to get an abortion to save my life. Potentially charged with murder. And my spouse would again be in a situation to lose both our potential baby and me.
Carrying a biological child to term myself is no longer an option I can even safely consider.
It’s a risk I don’t think I can take.
Since I was 19, I knew and understood having biological children myself was an unlikely endeavor. I was always upfront about it with any partners I had when we got to a more serious stage in our relationship, knowing for some it could be a deal breaker. A strange wave of safety and relief washed over me any time I had unprotected sex when I remembered that, between the pill and my body, my likelihood of getting pregnant was extremely low.
And yet, knowing that the choice of having biological kids myself has been taken away from me almost completely through none of my own actions fills me with a pain I didn’t know I would have.
When I was sexually assaulted by an ex-boyfriend, I missed my following period. Dread overtook my body as I bought pregnancy tests, looked up what my options were for an abortion. I wasn’t about to keep a child I didn’t want, was not in a place to have, fathered by a man who raped me, assuming carrying the child didn’t kill me first. The tests all turned out negative. I was lucky. Odds are I missed my period due to stress, and it was back on track the next month. But I also was in a place where I could get a safe and legal abortion if I absolutely needed to.
I can’t imagine what it must be like for those in a similar place now and in the future.
Even now, in the incredible off chance I become pregnant and things take a turn for the worse, I have options. I have money. I have time. I have flexibility. I have a supportive spouse. I could get somewhere I need to go to have a safe abortion, and I have the means to withstand the bullshit Texas bounty placed on any and everyone’s heads for even talking about an abortion. If absolutely necessary, my spouse and I can leave Texas altogether in a safe manner.
So many others won’t be so lucky.
The overturning of Roe v Wade and the subsequent bans and restrictions on abortions roughly half of the states will enact in its wake will and already has had dire consequences. Millions of people, mostly black and brown, mostly poor, mostly in the midwest and south, will be forced into births they don’t wish to have, for whatever reason they don’t wish to have them. Not to mention situations where those who wanted a baby find themselves facing the bitter truth that said baby won’t have a fighting chance outside the womb or that the pregnancy might kill them and the fetus, caught in difficult positions similar to what mine could be. Plus the horrific cases of pregnancy resulting from rape or incest, especially involving minors. Many of the resulting children will either be abandoned in some fashion, doomed to cyclical poverty, in families that actively detest them, or caught up in the awfulness that composes the US foster care and adoption systems. Many people will die as a result of this: from suicide as it feels like there are no other options; from dangerous at home attempts that marred pre-Roe history; from partners demanding a terminated pregnancy who get violent; from medical complications; from inaction.
“Well, surely this or that or the other thing,” you may be protesting at your screen. Surely, a miscarriage wouldn’t been seen as murder. Surely it can’t take that long and cost that much for a child to be adopted. Surely the foster care system is strong and safe. Surely no one would attack their pregnant partner. Surely people wouldn’t rather commit suicide than carry a pregnancy to term. Surely, with the exceptions, those who “truly need” an abortion could get one.
I don’t know how to make it any clearer that these things have happened in the past, happened even with the protections Roe afforded in a fragmented landscape of abortion laws in the US, and will happen in the future at a likely higher rate with worse consequences.
We can’t and shouldn’t let this happen. We can’t go back.
We can’t pretend this is about being “pro-life” when systems such as nationalized healthcare, parental leave, affordable child support, and so on, are not in place to ensure those giving birth and those birthed are supported and safe long after the event. We can’t pretend when we don’t have comprehensive sex education for our youth, and many feel powerless to say no to an aggressive sexual partner. We can’t pretend when there have already been multiple cases of pregnant folks losing a fetus through no fault of their own and being charged and sentenced with murder. We can’t pretend when there are hundreds of thousands of children in the foster care system, many of them aging out without a stable home, while wanting would-be parents spend tens of thousands of dollars and multiple years to try to adopt. We can’t pretend when some of the very men creating these laws and rulings are later found out to have paid for a safe abortion somewhere for a family member or mistress.
(As an aside: if you don’t have a uterus now, have never had a uterus, and don’t plan any time soon to have one implanted into you, I do not particularly care what your opinion against abortion is. I don’t care about your religious beliefs about it, I don’t care about your concern trolling, I do not wish to hear it. If you cannot now or ever have been able to give birth, it matters not your opinion on the matter, for you will thankfully never have to be in a potential situation to deal with it. You can keep your weird glee to yourself, but know you are celebrating the likely deaths of many that could have been prevented. May this knowledge haunt you eternally.)
As of now, I’m not sure what the answer is. A large liberal cohort is screaming VOTE and Nancy Pelosi has of course been sending me spam for donations. I might still vote, but I can’t say that is the answer. Not when in my voting lifetime, the codification of Roe was promised multiple times in the first year of a presidency then never delivered. Obama and Biden have promised this on the campaign trail, then not acted. Pelosi has been on record saying being anti-choice isn’t a dealbreaker to be a democrat, and as recently as this Texas primary cycle openly supported an anti-choice democratic nominee. Even Harris is out here, essentially shrugging off concerns. Abortion rights and threats to them is too popular a fundraising issue to actually codify. Boomer democrats love to get into power then hand wring about their inability to “do anything”, knowing full well their GOP opponents have zero qualms about underhanded tactics. Say what you will about republicans, they at least have the decency to tell me to my face their plans to pull rights away from those they think shouldn’t have any. When Greg Abbott says he wants to make abortion a felony, or forcibly detransition trans kids, or give already bloated police budgets even more money while cutting school budgets, I believe him. Appealing to those at the top seems to do nothing anyways; a majority of Americans across all political beliefs believe safe abortion should be accessible in some fashion (I’m certain there are breakdowns in regards to “to what term”, “how they should happen”, etc, but overall that it still should be legal and available). But much like other very popular across the spectrum items such as higher minimum wages, nationalized healthcare, codification of gay marriage, and so on, the political appetite to actually enact massively supported policies is nonexistent. This, of course, assuming you live in a place where voting isn’t actively being suppressed so only the “desirables” can vote. Protesting might work, but when states and the federal government of both political parties can and do call militarized police and actual military forces to suppress them, then that too is fraught at best, assuming the enthusiasm doesn’t fizzle out in a couple weeks.
In the meantime, I will lament the loss of a choice I knew was a long shot, but was still a shot. I will support abortion funds that will help get people who need care to where they can get it, and bail funds to keep folks out of jail during the process. I will brace myself for the likely subsequent overturnings of the cases surrounding same sex marriage, a right to contraception, and other bodily autonomy rights. I will have long talks with my spouse about solidifying what family planning means to us in a post-Roe Texas and America. I guess I’ll vote, but the DNC will continue to not see any of my money, nor will they see me encourage others to vote without a track record to vote on.
I will not, however, give up hope on not just safe and legal abortions for all, but for so many bodily autonomy rights that we are entitled to.
I can’t give up hope.
It’s all a lot of people got.
