Within minutes of the leaking of the draft opinion from the US Supreme Court calling for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Elizabeth Constance, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Heartland Center for Reproductive Medicine in Omaha, Nebraska, was inundated with messages on social media from concerned patients. What does this mean for the embryos I have frozen, they asked her. What does it mean for the egg retrieval I have planned? “Our patients are really afraid,” says Constance.
Should Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case which ruled that the right to abortion in the US is protected by the Constitution, be rolled back, the repercussions will be swift, and they will be devastating. And the realities of a post-Roe world will likely not stop at abortion bans. Many more frontiers of reproductive health are in peril, legal experts and bioethicists warn.
The most immediate concern, says Sean…
