The Generation That Lost <i><em>Roe</em></i> Refuses to Stop Fighting

I’m 23 years old and have now lived in a country that denies women basic reproductive freedom for nearly 20 percent of my life.

Four years ago this week, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I remember exactly where I was when the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision came down. I’d just finished my freshman year of college and was sitting in Rwanda with my mom. When Roe fell, more Americans—eight in 10!—supported reproductive freedom than at any other point in history. We lost anyway, and I was left feeling both furious and confused.

I read everything I could about what was already happening on the ground—accounts from physicians, including in this magazine, who described clinics thrown into chaos, staff and patients crying together in the face of uncertainty, fear, and helplessness. I was only just beginning to understand how this would ultimately play out at the state level.

I’ve spent the last four years learning—talking to activists, providers, and organizers across the country about what survival looks like in post-Dobbs America. And here is what I know now with absolute certainty: the shaky legal ground, the impossible guidelines, the state-by-state chaos—none of it is accidental. Confusion and cruelty are not the byproduct of this policy—as Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic, they are the point.

Since Dobbs, 21 states have banned or restricted abortion, pushing care out of reach and leading to the preventable deaths of pregnant women. In Texas, not only are new laws restricting access to reproductive care, but doctors and others in the health care system are working against the backdrop of intimidation and potential criminalization even in cases of medical necessity in lifesaving abortions.

Doctors can be arrested, jailed, and sued into ruin for providing health care. Fearing the consequences, they often defer or delay care. Josseli Barnica, for instance, one of at least two pregnant women in Texas who died after doctors delayed emergency care, was made to wait 40 hours because her doctors wouldn’t act. She died of a preventable infection three days later at age 28, leaving behind her husband and young daughter.

And it’s not just mothers who are dying. Abortion bans are causing newborns to die too; the hypocrisy of those who claim to be “pro-life” is infuriating. A 2025 study of abortion bans in 14 states found a 5.6 percent relative increase in overall infant mortality, with effects concentrated among already disadvantaged groups. Black infants, in particular, died at a rate 11 percent higher than would have been expected in the absence of bans. It can make you want to scream, or in some of the hardest moments, give up. But again, that’s by design.

Phoebe Gates at a Reproductive Freedom for All event.

And yet, I remain hopeful about the future. Because in these four years, there have also been telling signs of progress. Big fights in small towns have become stepping stones—win enough of them, ordinance by ordinance, city by city, and they become the path to a country that wins its reproductive freedom back. And it’s working.

Shield laws—now in 22 states and Washington, D.C.—have become one of the most important legal tools in the country, protecting providers and patients from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions for providing abortions in states where the procedure is legal. In 2024 alone, voters in seven states passed measures protecting reproductive rights. These ballot measures can change lives overnight; in Missouri, that measure gave a judge grounds to strike down the requirement that abortion pills be taken in a doctor’s presence.

This November, ballot measures will continue to play a central role. Reproductive freedom is up for a vote in Virginia, and in Missouri again—where a measure protecting abortion rights that passed just two years ago is already up for reversal and a near-total ban could return.

I’ve also witnessed something else these past four years: extraordinary adaptation and innovation from people who refuse to quit. Activists who understand that reproductive rights underpin every other freedom are running strategic, relentless campaigns at the state and local levels to claw back what my generation refuses to surrender.

Here’s one example that stayed with me. In 2024, the city of Amarillo, Texas, voted on a ballot measure called Prop A, which would have made it a crime to drive a neighbor down the highway to obtain reproductive care in another state. The controversial proposal drew national attention from both sides.

Gates with Karlie Kloss at a screening of Everybody’s Fight, a short film series and documentary project they co-created along with Culture House.

There’s a moment in Freedom at Stake, a short documentary I co-produced about the fight for abortion rights, where one woman captures exactly how far the other side is willing to go. “They are coming for our roads,” she says. The proposed legislation was also an open invitation to vigilantes—any private citizen could sue anyone they suspected of helping, with penalties starting at $10,000.

One ballot measure in one Texas city of 200,000 can sound like a footnote. But a win in Amarillo doesn’t stay in Amarillo. As the film’s director Raeshem Nijhon told an audience after a screening in Texas: “You have to pay attention to what’s happening in our cities, because this is what America is going to start to look like.”

She’s right. Prop A failed. Nearly 60 percent of voters said no. They came for the roads, and a town full of fierce organizers sent them home. As another woman in the film puts it, the other side’s entire strategy hinges “on smaller towns that maybe won’t fight back.”

The next fight is the most critical of our lifetime: the November midterms. Abortion is on the ballot across the country, and the stakes could not be clearer.

In Texas, James Talarico is running for U.S. Senate against Ken Paxton, the attorney general who spent years stripping reproductive rights from women, even blocking those in San Antonio and Austin from traveling out of state for care. Paxton, and any candidate who stands between a woman and her future, does not deserve our vote.

This fight isn’t hypothetical. It’s happening now, in races often decided by just a handful of votes. The most powerful thing we can do today is elect leaders who will protect and expand our freedoms.

Amarillo fought back. Now, it’s our turn to do the same.