For much of this country's history, aborting a pregnancy was fairly common -- and even openly discussed.
It wasn't until 1873 that Congress passed the Comstock Laws, criminalizing contraception and abortion. Even then, women continued to end unwanted pregnancies, often resulting in serious injury or death. A century later, in 1973, the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed a right to abortion.
All this may seem like ancient history. But it's a history we may soon revisit.
In December, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider the legality of Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban -- a ruling that could reverse Roe. If that happens, 26 states are ready to ban abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights policy organization.
Whenever I write about this issue, I hear from women who want to tell me their stories. Those old enough to remember say that "pre-Roe/post-Roe" is a false dichotomy: Whether legal or not, abortion has never been truly available to everyone.
These stories, each with threads of shame, secrecy and helplessness, offer a window into our still-unjust present -- and a past that feels more like prologue.
-- THE WIFE
Earl and Anne Broden married in 1948 in Nashville. A year later, when Anne was seven months pregnant with their first child, Earl contracted polio. The disease paralyzed him from the neck down. After nine months in an iron lung, he was transferred to a veterans hospital in Memphis.
Anne and the baby, Cathy, moved to Memphis to be near him. With Earl unable to work -- he would end up staying in the hospital for 30 years -- Anne needed to provide for herself and her daughter. She became a real estate agent in the 1950s, eventually owning her own business.
Decades later, Anne told Cathy a painful secret: In 1955, a colleague had raped her. And the assault resulted in a pregnancy.
Anne said she couldn't bear the thought of breaking Earl's heart by telling him what had happened. She knew he would blame himself.
Instead, she traveled out of state for an illegal abortion.
She told her daughter she still carried so much guilt about it.
"If you were in the exact same position, would you make the same decision today?" Cathy asked.
"In a heartbeat," Anne said.
-- THE MOTHER
It was 2017, and Love Holt, a recently divorced mother of four, had been dating a man for several months. The relationship was on the brink of falling apart, but they attempted to make up; after a day of drinking at a Mardi Gras celebration, they passed out in bed.
Love woke up naked, feeling as though she'd been assaulted in her sleep.
"Obviously, this was not a consensual thing," she said to him. She dumped him. Months later, feeling sick, she went to a clinic and learned she was 22 weeks pregnant.
"That's impossible," she said. "How did I miss a whole five months of pregnancy?"
The Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis told her that after the mandatory 72-hour waiting period, she would be too far along to get an abortion under Missouri law. Holt called a clinic in Illinois, but she didn't have health insurance and couldn't afford the fee.
"How am I going to feed another kid when I can't even come up with $800?" she thought. And as she got further along, the procedure would only get more expensive.
She became deeply depressed. Part of the horror was the feeling that each step of the way, someone else had made decisions about her body for her -- against her will.
At 34 weeks, her liver began to shut down, and doctors induced labor. After 26 epidural-free hours, she delivered a boy. She had planned to give him up for adoption, but changed her mind after holding him for the first time.
She now advocates for reproductive rights, an issue she says is bigger than any one court case: "(Abortion access) is about how much money they have, whether they have health insurance, their race.
"It's already tough to decide to have an abortion," she said. "Even though that was what I felt was best, I still did not have a choice."
-- THE TEENAGER
It was the summer before her senior year of high school, and Anne Taussig, then 18, was on the phone waiting for news that could change her life.
"The test came back positive," the doctor said. "You are pregnant."
She was stunned into silence.
Taussig was a straight-A student from a wealthy family, headed to Wellesley after graduation. Even though abortion was not yet legal, "I knew I would find a way out of it," she said.
Her father said she could go to New York to have an abortion. She ended up miscarrying before her appointment.
Taussig, now 70, says despite her privileged circumstances as a teenager, she remembers her desperation and panic upon hearing the test results. She knew she was no longer in control of her situation.
That may have been why she wanted to learn more about her grandfather, Frederick Joseph Taussig, a pioneering obstetrician who helped establish Planned Parenthood in Missouri. He had died in 1943, years before Anne was born.
Anne learned that her grandfather kept a sign posted in his surgery room.
It read, "SAVE THE MOTHER."