On the Catholic calendar, it was the holy day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the women who led Pregnancy Center East offered up their prayers.
One prayed for their clients who were upset about untimely pregnancies. Another prayed for nonbelievers to know they were loved by God. Another for the strength to endure hardship. The center’s director, Laura Curran, prayed for the nation.
“Lord, we wait anxiously for the Supreme Court decision,” she said. “We pray for protection for all Supreme Court justices, all churches, all pregnancy centers, and all those who are at risk of violence after this decision comes out.”
Curran and her small team were gathered in their makeshift chapel, as they were every morning before the clients arrived. Really, it was just a small conference room, with bright fluorescent lighting and dull office carpet. But at one end near the ceiling, there was a broad stained-glass panel, with white doves flanking a newborn baby Jesus, who beamed down rays of gold. Below that was a small wooden altar, carved with Christianity’s timeless words, “In Remembrance of Me.”
Tucked between the legs of the altar, they had added something else: A woven bassinet on a wooden rocker. Empty. Waiting.
The women joined in an ancient prayer.
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
The words echoed the old Gospel story: An angel appeared to a young woman, Mary, and declared that the power of the Most High would overshadow her, and she would conceive. Mary was greatly troubled, the scripture said, but she submitted to the word of the Lord and gave birth to the Son of God.
From her chair next to the altar, Curran could see through the cracked door to the lobby. A woman had arrived and was speaking quietly with a receptionist at the front desk. Time to work.
Curran checked her phone on her way to the room where they processed the pregnancy tests—nothing fancy, just the early detection ones from the pharmacy. It was just after 10:00 a.m. When she had woken up that morning, she had had a strange feeling that the decision might come today. But so far, there was nothing. She focused on the tasks in front of her.
The sonographer passed her on her way to see their first client. Pregnancy Center East was not a doctor’s office. It was one of about 2,700 similar centers across America that opposed abortion and intervened to prevent women from ending their pregnancies. They often offered free, basic ultrasounds in hopes that women would see their babies and choose to give birth.
The adoption representative was not in yet, but color-printed booklets of families wanting children lay ready on a table. That had been Curran once, before she got pregnant with “Luke the Fluke,” as she lovingly called him. Still, she and her husband adopted four children with an array of health needs. Abortion, Curran believed, should be illegal at conception.
At 10:10 a.m., a phone notification popped up. Curran called out to her staff, her low heels clicking quickly back across the lobby toward her office.
“The decision is out! The decision is out!” she said, passing the women behind the front desk without stopping.
She reached her computer and tapped the keyboard. The women crowded into her office doorway as she struggled to find the opinion online. The Supreme Court’s website kept crashing. The whole world was trying to load the same page. Curran kept searching.
“CBS has it on a special report … There’s an appendix … This is them commenting on it,” she murmured, trying to piece it together. “What’s the decision? What’s the decision?”
Curran had opposed abortion her whole life. She remembered when, in high school, a godfather of the antiabortion movement, Dr. John C. Willke, came to the gym and played a video of a suction abortion. The sound still echoed in her head. She and her friends bought silver cuff bracelets, stamped with the Greek letters alpha and omega and the date Roe v. Wade made abortion legal, January 22, 1973.
Suddenly she saw it. Printed on page one of the Supreme Court’s 213-page ruling. The words she and the women huddled at the door had longed to hear for decades:
Held: The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.
For seventeen seconds, silence filled the room.
Finally, Curran raised a tissue beneath her blue-rimmed glasses and straightened herself. The ruling was 6–3, someone said. Roe v. Wade was dead. The constitutional right to have an abortion in America was gone.
At that moment, abortion was legal for up to twenty-two weeks of pregnancy in Ohio. Within hours, a trigger law would go into effect, and nearly all abortions in the state would become illegal. By nightfall, the procedure was banned almost entirely in eight more states.
Curran could now engrave a new date on the other side of her silver cuff: June 24, 2022.
The women at the door seemed frozen, unsure whether to hug or cry or pray. It felt like the day the Berlin Wall fell, everything at once incredible and hyperreal, Curran thought. “It’s going to save so many lives,” she whispered. “Women are going to need us now more than ever.”
No one knew what it all meant, who was safe, and who was not.
At 10:48 a.m., Curran announced a precaution to her staff. “I’m going to go lock the inside door.”
At the other end of the center, a woman lay her body down on the ultrasound table. Bright lights to kill bacteria gave off a neon glow.
Her pregnancy had come as a surprise, and her sister had suggested she come here. She could see the black-and-white movement on the screen. A poster on the wall tracked pregnancy development across the first, second, and third trimesters. The sonographer said she was just about twenty weeks along.
The sticky gel dripped over her growing belly. She stared at her sonogram, unaware that beyond these walls, a new America had been born.
Curran kept a sheet of paper on her desk, to the right of her computer. It was an intake form that she’d flipped over to jot down some notes years ago, listening to a speech a professor gave the week of the annual March for Life in 2013 after President Barack Obama was reelected. “40 Years of R vs. W,” she had scrawled across the top.
The 1970s were the decade when “pro-life people were blindsided” by Roe and the increasing number of abortions, she said, reading off her sheet. In the 1980s, they got “battle ready” and enlisted evangelical support. In the 1990s, they were “besieged,” overwhelmed that their strategies weren’t making headway, but then women started to take on leadership positions in the movement. In the 2000s, they were “bewildered,” but had gotten more people to believe the fetus was a human, though “women’s rights trumped the baby’s rights.” Then came the 2010s, the rise of social media and a “new feminism” that was conservative, she said. It was the Obama era, when everything was up for grabs.
That was a decade ago, back when all this was unimaginable.