What My Mom Told Me About America Before <em>Roe</em>

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My world has always been conditioned by an automatic assumption of reproductive rights that my mother, the writer Erica Jong, did not have when she came of age. I was born in 1978, five years after Roe v. Wade. Like most women under 50, under 60 even, I find it hard even to imagine what life was like for women in those pre-Roe years. Yet that is the world we’re going back to if Justice Samuel Alito’s leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is any guide to the Supreme Court’s final ruling, now due any day.

My mother would tell me stories when I was growing up about her life in that pre-world. She described a place where a man could put, however put upon you were. She told me about how anxious she was eating alone in restaurants, because she’d been told that people might think she was a prostitute. About male teachers making sexual overtures, chasing her around a table, asking for oral sex.