Beyond Abortion: How Dobbs has Created a Crisis in Maternal Health | Irin Carmon W/ Susan J. Demas

A lot of the discussion of reproductive health rests on a false dichotomy: Good women give birth and bad women have abortions.

But in reality, about 60% of women who have abortions are already mothers. And in states that have banned abortion after the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, pregnancy care has deteriorated, as well — from OB-GYN shortages in states like Idaho to women being turned away for miscarriage care by hospitals afraid of running afoul of the law.

Journalist Irin Carmon takes an intimate look at this landscape in her upcoming book, Unbearable: Five Women and the Perils of Pregnancy in America, which comes out Oct. 28. The book also includes her own experience of being eight months pregnant when the Dobbs decision came down. Carmon recalls reading Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion. "I was so angry that I started writing a piece that was partly the inspiration of this book called, ‘I, Too, Have a Human Form,’” she recalls. “... because there's nothing in here about the person whose body is taken over willingly or unwillingly and is incurring enormous medical risks."

Carmon, who is now a senior correspondent for New York Magazine, started covering reproductive health in 2011 when the Tea Party Congress made defunding Planned Parenthood its first priority.

“As a political journalist, I found that there was a lot of pushback — and not just from male editors, but even from some of my female colleagues — when I covered abortion rights over the years because it was considered a less ‘serious,’ issue,” notes Lincoln Square Executive Editor Susan J. Demas. “There also was a prevailing idea that Roe would never be overturned that was scaremongering from Planned Parenthood and Democrats.”

But, of course, Roe has been overturned. And now the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is serving as a blueprint for autocracy for the Trump administration — and that includes enforcing traditional gender roles and rescinding civil rights.

"I think unfortunately for some people,” Carmon says, “it had to get much worse in order for them to understand what was really happening here."

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