If you’re from my generation, these stories will sound familiar. They may even be close to your own story.

When I was in college I knew two women who had unintentional pregnancies. Both were still teenagers. Neither of them was ready for motherhood. Both decided to have abortions. In the very early 1970s, it wasn’t easy to have that procedure. You couldn’t walk into your local clinic. Both had to travel. One of them went to New York. The other crossed the border into Mexico.

At my first job after college, I met a man who was the boyfriend of a co-worker. He became a friend and as I got to know him, I learned he had a younger sister who had died a few years earlier. She was the victim of a back-alley abortion that went bad. She felt desperate, didn’t tell her family and tried to handle this on her own. She was dead at twenty years old.

Roe v Wade became law in 1973. Had any of these pregnancies occurred a couple of years later their stories would have had different endings. My friend’s sisters may be alive today.

Yesterday, Politico broke a story that a leaked draft shows the Supreme Court will vote to overturn Roe. This won’t end abortions. It will make obtaining one much more difficult, as well as illegal in about half of the country. People who have to means to do so will be traveling to places like New York and Mexico, again. Others without resources will be forced into having dangerous back-alley abortions, again.

I wonder what the people involved in the stories are thinking today. I know they realize that we are about to go back to the not-so-good old days.

Type your email address in the box and click the “create subscription” button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.