Throughout that year, Isabella had a Nexplanon implant embedded in her arm. She knows that she can’t pin all her mental health on the hormonal birth control, but she’s well aware that it can shape moods. Once the implant expires, next summer, she’s determined to spend a few months without it or any kind of hormonal birth control. She wants to gauge who she might be without it, how her mental health might fare. She’s prepared to make sacrifices to find that out—including, potentially, no longer having sex with her longtime boyfriend.“Both of us are pretty anxious about doing it off birth control. Even with a condom, I think it just poses a lot of risks,” Isabella said. “If I did get pregnant at this age—which, I hope not and I do practice safe sex methods so that doesn’t happen—I would opt for abortion. Although it is not an easy decision to make, I’ve always known that’s what I would do. But now, knowing that I wouldn’t have that option, it’s really scary.”“If the possibility of pregnancy does happen, I kind of feel like my life would be over.”
Sure, some are bringing it up in therapy. They’re angry about it. But, for the most part, it’s the kind of rage that happens when an injustice strikes somewhere else in the world. It lacks urgency.“They’re talking about it in a foreign way,” Amanda Pasciucco, a sex therapist in West Hartford, Connecticut, said of her clients. “They’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, could you imagine if you were in Texas? Could you imagine?’ But they’re not, like, dating someone down South.”Jennifer Aull, a sex therapist in New York City, put her clients’ philosophy more bluntly: “We’re two countries, and that’s happening more in the other one.”The threat to abortion—and, by extension, to people’s sex lives—stretches far beyond the Lone Star State. Sometime next year, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case that promises to be the most pivotal abortion case in a generation, if not since Roe v. Wade itself was decided in 1973. The case turns on a 2018 Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy—that is, before the fetus can be expected to survive outside the womb, a benchmark that typically occurs at around 24 weeks into pregnancy. Under Roe, states are blocked from prohibiting abortions before fetal viability.“We’re two countries, and that’s happening more in the other one.”
Abortion rights supporters who spoke to VICE about the case, even before the Texas vote came down, were not exactly hopeful that it would go their way.“People have thought that we’re this Chicken Little, screaming that the sky is falling, the sky is falling,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder and executive director of We Testify, which works to promote the representation of people who have had abortions. “The time to have acted and prevented what is about to happen was 10 years ago.”Over the last decade, the response to conservatives’ coordinated attack on abortion has been, at best, muted, even though anti-abortion activists have managed to pass at least 566 abortion restrictions since 2011. So many of these restrictions are tedious, mired in the kind of mind-boggling bureaucracy that makes people reflexively look away. They have required abortion clinics to have extra-wide hallways, for example, or mandated that they maintain particular agreements with nearby hospitals, such as making sure that abortion providers can admit patients.“The time to have acted and prevented what is about to happen was 10 years ago.”
One sex therapist who said her clients are starting to change their behavior lives in the swath of the country where access to legal abortion is on the verge of vanishing. De-Andrea Blaylock-Johnson, who works in St. Louis, said that her clients and her local community are starting to get antsy about the future of abortion. One nonbinary client is struggling with whether and how to go on hormonal birth control; they’re weighing the fear that contraception will interfere with their hormones against the danger that they may soon be without a legal way to end a pregnancy.If Roe is overturned, abortion rights would be protected in less than half of the U.S.
But sex therapy clients’ distant attitude toward abortion rights isn’t just a matter of geography, even if that’s what clients are telling their therapists, or themselves. The clients who do remain frustrated don’t seem to believe that their own ability to end a pregnancy will be threatened. And they’re not wrong about that assumption, given that they’re at least wealthy enough to afford a sex therapist.“It’s not that people were using abortion as birth control. They just knew it was an option that was available if and when a pregnancy came about.”
“There was a real fear, and now people are like, I’m alive! Let’s go have fun!’ Cool, go have fun, be safe. You do realize that there’s this possible decision that’s looming on the horizon that could really impact you if you happen to get pregnant when you didn’t want to be?” said Susan Milstein, a clinical assistant professor at Texas A&M University who teaches about human sexuality and women’s health. “I think people don’t realize that. We’re tired. We’ve just been through lockdown. It’s hard to have all the emotions at once right now, and why not choose the fun emotions?”“We’re tired. We’ve just been through lockdown. It’s hard to have all the emotions at once right now, and why not choose the fun emotions?”
A moderator of r/abortion, a subreddit where people frequently discuss how to obtain abortions, told VICE over email that when prominent new abortion restrictions are passed, they routinely see spikes in “posts discussing things like getting an IUD or other LARC, having Plan B and/or mife/miso at home just in case, and/or moving to Canada” on subreddits dedicated to talking about abortion. (Plan B is the so-called morning after pill, while “mife/miso” is a reference to mifepristone and misoprostol, the two drugs commonly used to conduct medication abortions. Medical experts widely agree that this kind of abortion can be performed safely at home.) But a representative of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said that, so far, their members aren’t really seeing patients who ask questions about preparing for a post-Roe world.Abortion has been legal for the entirety of Gen Z’s lives, so reproductive rights can feel like their mothers’—or even their grandmothers’—fight.
Mary and her friends seem to be in the minority, despite the growing likelihood that abortion rights will disappear—or perhaps because of it. When Alabama passed a law to ban almost all abortions in 2019, the country erupted. Thousands of dollars poured into funds meant to help people pay for abortions. Rihanna even tweeted a photo of the white, male state legislators who’d backed the ban. “These are the idiots making decisions for WOMEN in America,” the singer wrote. It garnered nearly half a million likes.But when Arkansas and Oklahoma passed near-identical laws this year, pop stars, like the rest of the public, were mostly silent. As a longtime reproductive rights reporter, I’m used to people shrugging away abortion restrictions, but I was still struck by the slide from outrage in 2019 to indifference in 2021. Although the Texas ban has now drawn far more attention, it was only after the Supreme Court failed to stop it, after it was too late to stop mob justice from becoming the law of the land, that more people realized what had happened.“I’ve really had to think like, ‘Oh if this were to happen to me, I would have to travel.’ If I were to get pregnant and need an abortion, I would have to travel to go do that, and being a college student, I can’t do a little trip or getaway to another state.”
Smith doesn’t plan to rewrite her approach to sex and relationships; she always uses two forms of contraception anyway. But that’s a privilege that not everyone possesses, she told VICE. And whether someone changes their sexual habits to adapt to the end of Roe shouldn’t affect whether they deserve an abortion.“However a person decides to go about their sex life really should not play into any argument when it comes to legislation,” Smith said. “I think a lot of people think of pregnancy as a direct consequence of sex. If you have sex and you get pregnant, then you shouldn’t have access to an abortion because that’s your fault. And they take people less seriously, or they judge people more seriously, for the contraceptives that they use and the sex that they have, which I don’t think is warranted. It’s really none of anyone’s business.”“It’s really none of anyone’s business.”