Four days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, I arrived hot and resentful to a Manhattan hospital for a 32-week ultrasound accompanied by my husband. There was no particular reason for the scan, no diagnosed concern, just an impersonal risk calculation based on the fact that I was, at 38, of “advanced maternal age.”
This would be my second child, and admittedly some jadedness had set in. As a reporter, I’d also been more than a little distracted; I’d been covering the high court’s decision in Dobbs, which had almost instantly banned abortion in 13 states.
And yet. As I lay back on the exam table in the darkened room, passive and obedient, a face that had eluded us suddenly appeared on the sonogram monitor, a shockingly clear delineation: an upturned nose and pouting lips hanging open. We gazed at her in quiet surprise. “She’s looking more like a person now,” I murmured to my husband.
