Had Emma realised she was pregnant a few days earlier, things might have happened differently. She could have accessed abortion services at the Planned Parenthood clinic close to her home in Texas, which only allows abortions up to six weeks. She would have set up medical appointments rather than taking a pill to induce abortion which her friend had bought on a trip to Mexico.
In the end, she found herself watching YouTube videos produced by the international humanitarian agency Médecins Sans Frontières to guide women through the process of having a safe abortion using pills. The videos seemed designed for someone “in a very rural area or in a country where there aren’t doctors very accessible to them”, Emma thought — not for a woman living in one of Texas’s biggest cities.
The predicament 29-year-old Emma faced is one that hundreds of thousands of American women could confront if the Supreme Court enacts a draft opinion, leaked this week, that would overturn Roe vs Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling enshrining the constitutional right to abortion across the US.