What Men Can Expect in a Post-Roe World

All Americans should know how to get abortion pills

- By Hannah Matthews

MAYBE YOU SAW IT ONLINE. MAYBE YOU heard it on NPR. Maybe your girlfriend told you as you lay in bed together scrolling through your phones, her fielding frantic texts from her group chat or checking in on her mom, you reading legal analyses, both of you fluorescent with rage and despairing at the news: According to a leaked initial draft of its majority opinion, the Supreme Court planned to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision upholding our constitutional right to abortion. Legal access to safe, common, and often lifesaving medical care was disappearing before your eyes.

But no matter how you learned of this, and no matter how consumed you were with righteous anger and concern that night, I'm willing to bet you did not wake up the morning after, or the morning after that, or every morning since, full of fear. I don't mean that you don't care, because I know you do.

It's just that most cisgender men in my life don't seem to know much about the actual mechanics of abortion, or how it affects them. Until now, a pregnant person's relative access to safe, legal abortion has often provided luxury to the men around her: the luxury of not having to worry about it or to know who had one or when. Seventy-three million people worldwide get an abortion every year-a club whose membership has always included people you know and love and the date and work with, and there are as many reasons for those abortions as there are members. Mine was that I needed an abortion to avoid the high-risk pregnancy and birth that might have robbed my existing child of a healthy, living mom. I knew it from the moment the plus sign appeared on the pregnancy test.