The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, radically transforming the nation’s reproductive healthcare landscape. Without previous protections, 14 states have banned abortion, and a growing number have put new restrictions in place regarding the time frame in which women can go through with one. Ahead of an election that could have a critical impact on women’s health moving forward, we asked Black women how the court’s decision has impacted their love lives, sexual practices, and family planning goals.
Jourdan Clark, 27, was filled with “immediate anger” when the court announced the historic verdict. “Government officials and human beings, in general, need a new level of empathy,” she tells ESSENCE. “People constantly want to judge first and provide empathy and consideration later.”
As a Colorado resident, Clark’s home state preserves the right to choose should she ever need to exercise it. But she thinks of those in her previous home of New Orleans often. “If I still lived in the South, that wouldn’t be an option for me,” she says. “Louisiana reclassified medications used in medical abortions as Schedule IV controlled substances in September, according to NBC News. This means they can now be treated as drugs that could create dependency or be abused.
Clark’s love life has been directly affected. “It’s definitely impacted it a lot solely because I haven’t been as active,” she says. “I was already cautious.”
Caution is leading to an increase in direct conversations. “Dating in this post-Roe world definitely has added a layer of complexity, especially as a single Black woman,” says Sabrina Browne, 32, of New Jersey. She considers family planning now more than ever when dating and discusses it freely.
“You really need to have those open conversations with the people you’re seeing about sexual and reproductive health,” she says. “It’s not just about chemistry anymore with dating. While that’s important, it’s about how you’re going to handle the unexpected.”
Shantal Anderson, however, has not had her romantic life impacted by the reversal. “It has not changed the way I operate in my dating life,” the 35-year-old Californian says. “I’m not sexually active because I choose not to have sex until I’m married. I feel like a lot of the outcry comes from people that don’t value traditional relationships and traditional households.”
Celibacy is on the rise among millennials and Gen-Z. Anderson expressed hope that the decision will spark the widespread adoption of behavior that reflects her personal values, but if nothing else, that it will begin important conversations. “Sometimes, I think the misconception is that because we live on the West Coast, everyone is liberal, everyone’s progressive,” she says. “This is a great time to have this conversation because I don’t think a lot of these conversations are happening in our modern-day society.”
“It hasn’t impacted me. If anything, it’s helped me,” she adds. “It’s hard sometimes for me to date because people want sex on the first or second or third date, and that’s just not my truth. And so I kind of feel liberated and empowered. I think it’s going to start putting this responsibility on how people act.”
Anderson has no children, but she does not harbor concerns about the ruling potentially limiting her future family planning options. “I don’t believe in IVF,” she says.
Denae Hill, however, does. The 26-year-old, who resides in Illinois (where abortion is a fundamental right), has great concerns about the ruling’s implications for her journey to parenthood.
“It made me rethink family planning, because, as someone who is queer, IVF is a very important part of that journey. So I had to be very realistic of what my options were,” she says.
Hill has also reconsidered the idea of relocating to Texas for work. The Supreme Court has shut down challenges to Texas’ abortion ban, according to the Associated Press. Add to that her worries about carrying a child (“I also have endometriosis, so that is a risk for me”) amid this country’s troubling maternal health crisis, where it’s reported that “Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women,” according to the Centers for Disease Control.
“Being a Black woman, understanding that the medical industry is not necessarily going to take care of whatever complications that I may have, it put me in a situation of thinking, do I even want to have a child if I might not be around to take care of it?” Hill asks.
Clark has had the same thoughts and worries. “It is heartbreaking, especially as a Black woman, to have one of my options taken off the table in a certain state,” she says. “You know we have the highest maternal death rate in the United States.”
Lauren Johnson, 36, wants to emulate her parents’ long-standing marriage and family structure. “I want to carry that tradition with me,” the New Yorker says. That desire used to exclusively guide her choices. She now worries about the way an unplanned pregnancy might affect those plans and her professional goals, and that impacts how she goes about dating.
“I have seen women who have had to delay their dreams,” she says. “I feel a lot more guarded. What if I do put myself out there and, you know, the guy ends up being wrong for me? How does that then impact me professionally? How does it impact how I’m perceived in my career?”
There are so many questions and anxieties that have come about in the more than two years since Roe v. Wade was reversed. As women deal with the uncertainties of the future, deciding how they want to date, how they should handle their sex lives, and when, or if they’ll have children, many firmly believe in a simple rallying cry: My body, my choice.
“It only takes two people to form a child,” Clark says. “But ultimately, it’s my womb.”