On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its infamous opinion overturning the nearly 50-year-old landmark case of Roe v. Wade, which established a federal constitutional right to abortion. The court’s shameful decision triggered a cascade of abortion bans in states across the country, as anti-abortion politicians rushed to introduce bills pushing access to essential health care out of reach or blocking it entirely.

This devastating blow to civil rights and bodily autonomy. For some, the impact was immediate: appointments at some clinics were canceled, patients seeking care were forced to travel across state lines, and others had to carry pregnancies that endangered their health. For others, the impact took shape over the course of the last year, triggering career shifts, changing education plans, and questioning life plans.

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We wanted to learn more about how the overturn of Roe impacted your lives over the course of the last year, so we put out a call and asked you to share your stories. Hundreds of people from across the country responded and told us how your lives were altered by the Supreme Court’s decision. Kendall Ciesemier, the host of our podcast At Liberty, spoke to a few of you for this week’s episode, which you can listen to here. Below, you can read some of the responses we gathered, which have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Thank you so much for sharing your stories with us.

A Year Without Roe: Your Stories

Nearly one year ago, on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case concerning a...

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“My husband and I’ve been planning baby number two for quite some time, and were really excited to bring another bundle of joy into the world … Right around the 10-week mark, I was experiencing some miscarriage symptoms, kind of freaked out, went to the E.R. in Baton Rouge … But they would not confirm that it was a miscarriage or not. One of the nurses there literally sent me home just saying, ‘I’m sitting at home with prayers.’ She just wouldn’t have the conversation. I went to a different hospital the next day … the bleeding, all of that got extremely worse, I was passing tissue at this point. So a couple days went by, the symptoms just got worse. I finally ended up at a local facility auction and one of the midwives there saw me. I’m forever grateful to her and she confirmed that I was having a miscarriage like days later. And I just thought … like how many women of color are experiencing this and, quite frankly, how many white women are not? I just can’t help but think how many lives are going to be lost as a result of folks just being turned away.” — Kaitlyn

“We were really excited because it had been almost two years of wanting to have another baby and not being able to. And then the nightmares set in. Basically, from the time I found out I was pregnant at three weeks until my first scan, every single night I was having dreams that we went in to have the scan done and something had happened to the baby. It was just constant. Like I would just wake up convinced that something had happened. After the first scan, the dreams turned into these post-apocalyptic nightmares. And I don’t watch scary movies. I don’t consume scary media. My dreams are worse than anything I would ever consent to viewing or doing in my real life…I think there’s this idea that it’s abortion is just about ‘I don’t want a kid.’ And it’s more than that.” — Katherine

“You know, it makes me take a step back from even wanting to date — to be perfectly honest, it makes me not even want to go there because of the off chance that something could happen … It’s made relationships end very quickly … If I were to get pregnant, it would be fatal to the embryo and me. It’s just made it so that I tend to pull back a little bit more and not have that connection with other people. ” — Margaret

“I’m an OBGYN and I lived in Oklahoma for 10 years, and then just moved to Washington, D.C. three weeks ago. [After the Dobbs decision], I could not give my patients any resources to figure out where to go for abortion care. We got word that there had been threats of violence against our clinics. So all of these things kind of came together. The law that I can’t talk to my patients, that terrible gun control, and the real threats of violence. And ultimately, I decided, hey, I either need to stay and be willing to fight. And I did consider that … I thought about running for local office and really trying to make a difference. And ultimately, I decided I couldn’t put my family through that and worry about, you know, my clinics or my job or anything like that. So ultimately we decided to leave…We had a really good life there and it was really, really sad to leave.” — Kate

“Because of Justice Thomas’ concurrence stating that Obergefell v. Hodges may need a closer look, which was the decision that allowed us to legally marry, my now wife and I became very scared and decided that we were going to forgo a big wedding and marry at the courthouse. Our families are still not very happy with us about the decision.” — Shelby

We celebrate Pride this year in defiance of the almost 500 anti-LGBTQ bills pending or passed in state legislatures around the country. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are turning to the criminal legal system to enforce homophobia and transphobia:

• Bills that would criminalize health care providers and families of trans children for providing necessary and life-saving gender affirming care.
• Bills that would criminalize drag performances.

Queer people have always been over-criminalized and over-incarcerated. This is especially true for Black trans women and other trans women of color. According to the Sentencing Project, LGBTQ adults are incarcerated at three times the rate of the general population. Among trans people, 1 in 6 report being incarcerated at any point in their lives — and nearly half of those are Black trans people.

LGBTQ people live in a social reality that makes their lives much more precarious. For example, LGBTQ people are more likely to experience discrimination in housing and employment, meaning they are more likely to experience poverty and homelessness. Because our nation criminalizes people for poverty, LGBTQ people are more likely to be arrested and get trapped in the criminal legal system.

Governments criminalize queer people’s mere existence — and Black trans women and trans women of color are especially vulnerable. Police use laws criminalizing sex work to target trans women of color for “walking while trans.” For example, The New York Times reported in 2016, police used the extremely broad “anti-loitering” law to profile trans women of color as sex workers, including based on their appearance: they were “arrested while wearing short dresses or high heels or tight pants and, in one bizarre instance, that well-known symbol of sexual seduction: a black pea coat.” The law was repealed in 2021.

A relic of the moral panic around the AIDS epidemic, the majority of states still criminalize people living with HIV. These laws are based on discrimination, pure and simple, not on any valid public health rationale.

Ending mass incarceration and over criminalization must be, and has always been, a central part of the movement for LGBTQ liberation. Indeed, what we celebrate at Pride is an uprising against police violence and harassment, where queer and trans people asserted their right to live freely.

Credit: Eric O. Ledermann / Shutterstock

Because the criminal legal system is a tool for oppressing and controlling Black people, people of color, low-income people of all races, and queer and trans people — our shared freedom lies in significantly reducing the footprint of mass incarceration while investing in the resources our communities need to thrive and to be safe.

At the front end, that must mean supporting bail reform and pretrial release. On any given day in the United States, 427,000 people are incarcerated in our more than 3,000 jails despite not having been convicted of a crime. Many of these people are inside because they can’t afford their freedom. And, as a number of our lawsuits have shown, wealth-based pretrial detention is not only contrary to safety and justice, it is unconstitutional.

Even a few days in pretrial detention can have devastating impacts on a person, depriving them of their safety and stability. People in pretrial detention often lose their jobs, housing, or custody of their kids. They are separated from their families and community support networks — who scramble to figure out childcare and come up with the money to bail out their loved one. And conditions in jails are almost universally abysmal.

For LGBTQ people, pretrial detention carries additional risks. LGBTQ people often are held in solitary confinement to separate them from the general population “for their safety” — even though solitary confinement, even for short periods of time, has profound and irreversible psychological and physical effects.

Trans people generally do not have a choice about whether they’d feel safer in a men’s or women’s jail, do not receive access to gender-affirming health care or clothing, and face greater risk of violence, including sexual violence, from other people in the jail and jail staff.

The tragic and preventable death of Layleen Polanco is a case in point. Ms. Polanco was an Afro-Latina trans woman who could not afford $500 in bail. She died in solitary confinement at Rikers Island Jail in May 2019.

A report from the city agency with oversight of the jail found the Department of Corrections’ policy not to house transgender women with cisgender women contributed to the decision to put Ms. Polanco in solitary — even though she had epilepsy, a serious medical condition that should have exempted her from isolation. Her death was determined to be the result of medical complications due to epilepsy.

Bail funds like the LGBTQ Freedom Fund and SONG’s Black Mamas Bail Out Action center the intersectional experience of low-income, Black LGBTQ people and bail them out.

Jurisdictions that have adopted bail reform — whether through legislation or because of legal action — have seen significant positive impacts on safety and justice. A recent study of 11 jurisdictions with bail reform found eliminating cash bail had significant positive impacts for individuals, families and communities, in terms of relieving the financial burden and keeping families and communities intact. Those studies found crime and bail reform are not strongly linked — despite baseless fearmongering to the contrary.

The enormous efforts hostile state legislators and elected officials are taking to harm queer and trans people and pursue failed punitive policies only offer us fear and a lack of imagination, love, or empathy. If we want justice and safety for all of us, we need to reject punishment — and reject those who offer us punishment and call it safety.

Instead, we can demand investments in communities of abundance, where everyone has what they need to thrive: affordable housing, economic opportunity, health care access, well-resourced and affirming schools, and freedom from incarceration and violence.

Queer and trans communities offer us an expansive vision of love, safety, and justice. It is one where the streets are safe for all of us, no matter who we are or what we look like. It is one where we take care of each other. That is the world we want to live in, and that world is within reach.

Last week, the Department of Justice issued a report finding that the Minneapolis Police Department routinely used excessive force against Black and Indigenous people, and that George Floyd’s murder arose from this pattern of misconduct. They will now negotiate a consent decree with the city of Minneapolis to institute reforms. The report is damning, and it offers a view into an often-obscured problem of police violence.

Police violence is common across police departments, and it leads to trauma, injury, and killings in primarily Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. State and local authorities — who are responsible for most of America’s police — should not wait for a federal investigation before they address police violence. They can start now by building interlocking reforms that advance three key goals: reduce, rectify, and repair.

What do we mean by “police violence”? Police violence stems from this country’s history of using police to oppress marginalized people. American policing has never been a neutral institution. It perpetuates racism and oppression by design. From “slave patrols” that used terror and torture against enslaved Black people engaged in uprisings, to armed militia that enforced Black Codes and Jim Crow, to police that subverted labor unions to benefit political elites in the 19th century, policing has always been tied to suppression, surveillance, and control.

Police violence is not only when officers kill. It’s also the use of excessive force. It’s when police throw people into walls, onto pavement, or against cars. It’s when police punch and kick people who are face down on the ground. It’s when police pull tasers or guns on people who are compliant or restrained — a practice the Justice Department documented in Minneapolis. In heavily policed communities, police violence is a brushfire that steadily burns.

American Civil Liberties Union

Police Excessive Force | American Civil Liberties Union

In a country devastated by the deaths and injuries at the hands of police officers, drastic changes are needed.

When police kill people, it’s often a flare-up of that brushfire. After a high profile killing, the police department responsible frequently faces an investigation that uncovers a pattern of abusive and biased practices. Nearly 25 years ago, after the NYPD killed Amadou Diallo — an unarmed Black man — in a hail of 41 bullets, an investigation by the New York Attorney General found that the NYPD was stopping alarming numbers of Black and people without proper cause. In more recent years, Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by Louisville police while she slept in her home. An investigation by the Department of Justice later found that Louisville’s police department had a widespread practice of excessive force and “an aggressive style of policing” against marginalized people. The Minneapolis report is yet another example on a long list.

Prohibitions are not enough to solve the problem. When an NYPD officer killed Eric Garner using a chokehold in 2014, chokeholds were illegal in New York. The policy could not save Mr. Garner because the NYPD had for years pressured officers to aggressively stop-and-frisk Black people like him. The NYPD has long had policies regulating the use of force, including a training on the subject since 2016. Yet in a lawsuit one of us brought against the NYPD concerning an incident in 2020, officers punched and stomped on a 59-year-old Black man lying on the ground while calling him racial epithets. In another recent case, NYPD officers hit and kicked a 29-year-old Palestinian-American student whose hands were zip-tied behind his back; they pulled his head scarf over his eyes before beating him.

The disconnect between paper and practice in part results from bias. It also results from officers being directed to engage in abusive tactics; from officers seeing that excessive force is condoned and not condemned, to political fearmongering about “criminals.” While we need policies prohibiting excessive force, we also need to dismantle oppressive and biased police practices that fuel the fire.

That can’t be done with one-size-fits-all strategies. Rather, extinguishing the conditions that breed violence among police requires implementing interlocking measures that simultaneously advance three objectives: reduce, rectify and repair. “Reduce” means reducing our reliance on police where armed responders are not needed and limiting police discretion in areas where bias and aggression are common, like stop-and-frisk. “Rectify” means establishing mechanisms inside and outside the police department that interrupt and prevent police violence, such as civilian review boards with subpoena power and systems that require departments to act on complaints from the public to ensure accountability and transparency. “Repair” means ensuring the harms from police violence are redressed, which includes compensating those injured and empowering the impacted community to design accountability and safety measures on their terms.

American Civil Liberties Union

Saving Black Lives in Pittsburgh, One Call at a Time | ACLU

The pioneering Black-led ambulance service Freedom House brought medical aid and compassion where police brought harm or neglect.

Examples of changes advancing these objectives exist around the country. Philadelphia removed police from enforcing minor traffic violations like broken taillights that were unfairly used against Black people. The NYPD was ordered to incorporate complaints against officers in an early intervention system that triggers remedial action. And Chicago launched initiatives to redress police torture that included payment to victims, education funds for victim’s families, and community-designed health supports.

As James Baldwin said, “responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” State and local authorities must not abdicate their responsibility to end police violence; they must act now to protect communities.