In the two years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, countless people have shared their personal experiences with reproductive health – including accessing abortion, seeking fertility services, experiencing miscarriages and giving birth.
Among them are six women whose experiences ran the gamut.
All declined to use their full names for this report, citing privacy concerns. Their stories are below.
AP
AP, a high school student who lives in northern Georgia, found out she was pregnant in June 2023. She worried about how to balance a pregnancy with mental health concerns including PTSD, depression, anxiety, ADHD and panic disorder.
The three health providers she regularly saw were unable to tell her if she could safely continue her medications: Zoloft, cyproheptadine, Klonopin and methylphenidate.
“Nobody would give me a straight answer,” she said.
“The last time I stopped my medications I ended up going to the hospital for a suicide attempt,” she said. “…I decided that the best course of action was to get an abortion because I could not handle being unmedicated and pregnant.”
“If I were able to continue on medication I wouldn’t be so against continuing my pregnancy.”
The medication abortion she took at home was unsuccessful, so her family drove her eight hours roundtrip to Virginia. But the clinic there could not accommodate her because she was further along than she thought in her pregnancy.
Two weeks later, they returned to a different city in Virginia for a procedural abortion — an experience she describes as the “absolute worst pain in my entire life.”
“A lot of people talk about the medical exceptions but they don’t think about mental health,” said AP, who was 17 at the time of her abortion. “I physically couldn’t handle pregnancy and mentally I wouldn’t be able to handle one either.”
Isabella
Isabella, a New York college student, is from Brazil, where abortion is illegal except for limited circumstances. She had her abortion at 21 weeks, which is later than 99 percent of abortions performed in the U.S.
The delay was partly caused by her desire to find information about how to navigate her mental health conditions while pregnant, and whether her medications would interfere with an abortion.
“It took me a long time to actually find the care,” she said.
While waiting for an appointment with a reproductive psychiatrist, she changed her medications, which she said made everything worse.
Isabella, who has ADHD, said she was told she only needed to stop taking medication for that condition if she continued her pregnancy.
“I wish I knew I didn’t have to stop those meds, for example. It would have helped a lot and made a lot of things easier if I knew,” Isabella said.
She still doesn’t feel comfortable talking about the abortion with her regular psychiatrist or therapist.
“I’m still processing not the abortion, but the mental health crisis that happened in that moment,” she said. “This is the first time I’m talking more openly about it.”
Jessica
Jessica, 37, was ready to divorce her husband when she became pregnant. But he wanted to fight for their marriage with the stipulation that she have an abortion.
He left notes on her door, car and mirror urging her to have an abortion even after he moved out.
After “just complete mental torture and torment, I did do the [abortion] pill then,” she said, but couldn’t complete the two-step process.
“I stayed in my bedroom for probably, like a week or two, just even debating taking this pill. I called it my torture chamber, and I literally would just sit there and have on and off crying spells.”
She recalls sleeping to cope, searching through online anonymous groups and denying herself things because of feelings of guilt. She felt guilty about an earlier miscarriage and was plagued with thoughts about if she would need to make funeral arrangements.
Before the experience, Jessica, who is a nurse, says she’d never experienced any mental health issues.
Jessica and her husband got divorced a month or two before her daughter — who is about to turn 2 — was born.
“In general, I feel like women don’t really talk about miscarriages or abortions, either one,” Jessica said. “It’s one of those topics that’s so passionate and so sensitive for people that I don’t think women really know who is a safe place.”
Neesha
After the Dobbs decision, Neesha, 33, an Atlanta-based mom of two, became pregnant again. She knew abortion was not an option for her and ultimately decided to put her child up for adoption.
“I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to, you know, keep my child in the moment, and I want my baby to have a better quality of life,” said Neesha.
Adoption, she said, is “not really heard of in the Black and brown community. It takes a while to kind of process things, you know, when you haven’t heard of anything with adoption before.”
Her adoption agency asked her what the ideal life for her baby would look like and what she would want for her child.
When she lost her job, the agency helped her with resources including counseling, allowing her to focus on her own health without the stipulation she had to choose adoption.
“It was my choice, and I had that. It was my body, and I needed to take care of it, and get all the health care that I needed to get to for me to be healthy, not only just the baby,” she said.
Neesha’s baby is now 1 1/2 years old. She and her kids regularly spend time with the adoptive family.
“I never had to really sit down and try to grieve or try to feed myself anything negative, like it was all good,” she said,
Before Dobbs, she says she might not have done as much research into other options.
“I’m happy that abortion wasn’t an option for me in that moment,” she said. “My baby’s here. He’s healthy, he’s beautiful, and he’s amazing.”
Samantha
Samantha* had an unexpected pregnancy in the summer of 2024.
As a single mom, she wanted to focus on her daughter without the added stress and expense of a second child.
About a decade ago, she had an abortion locally. But now, her home state of Louisiana bans most abortions.
This time, she connected with an Illinois-based clinic and braced herself for a 14- to 15-hour trip to Chicago. Support staff arranged for her to fly there. Still, not having a local option added additional stress to her experience.
“Honestly, I’m so private, I haven’t even reached out to anyone. I just kind of just dealt with it, just trying to put it behind me,” said Samantha, who would have confided in her mother if she were still alive.
“I did what I felt that was best for me. I’m in a much better place now than what I was back then,” Samantha said. “I just hate that I had to travel to have it done. I wish I still could have had that option to have it done here, where I live in Louisiana.”
Vanessa
When Vanessa* learned she was pregnant in 2022, she was “super excited.”
“I’ve always wanted a family, but my boyfriend, at the time, was being unfaithful. He had other plans, so he did not want me to go forward with having her. “
Her ex, she said, abused her by screaming at and harassing her. On their anniversary, he threatened to lock her in a moving car if she didn’t end her pregnancy.
He made several abortion appointments that she canceled but finally felt pressured to go to a medication abortion appointment.
But she never completed the abortion.
“I couldn’t really live with myself,” she said.
She left their home in California, fleeing to North Carolina to start over closer to her family. Today, she is working on a degree to become a behavioral therapist. Her daughter is 18 months old.
“It’s still a lot of trauma,” she said, adding, “I did find a really good therapist.”
*Pseudonym used to protect privacy.
These stories are part of a series supported through the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism.
If you or someone you know is facing a mental health crisis, please call the toll-free, 24-hour 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 9-8-8 to connect to a trained counselor.
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