This is an excerpt from our post-election symposium, “On the Return of Trump.”
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, friends asked me whether I was worried for my four-year-old daughter’s future, specifically her access to legal abortion. My answer: not in California, and not with an abortion provider for a mom. In the worst-case scenario, I joked, I could perform her abortion in my garage.
The joke is even less funny now as I consider the implications of a second Trump presidency for the future of my work, and for girls’ and women’s reproductive freedoms. If a Trump Justice Department moves to enforce the Comstock Act (an 1873 anti-obscenity law that could be used to prohibit the mailing of abortion-related medications and equipment), or if Trump should go so far as to enshrine fetal personhood in the Constitution (as anti-abortion lobbyists will pressure him to do), doctors in states like California who provide care for women traveling from restricted states will ourselves be severely restricted. This means that I, like physicians in Texas, Idaho, and elsewhere, will be forced to turn patients away—not for medical reasons, not because I am not trained to help them, but because of moral decrees handed down by politicians. The worst part is that I will turn them away knowing that if my own daughter ever needs an abortion, she will get one—either in my garage, or in the same way those politicians’ daughters will get theirs: by flying to a place where it can be done safely and discreetly, at a price unaffordable for most of my patients.
For doctors who believe, as I do, that every woman should be able to terminate her pregnancy for any reason at any time, it has always required some compromise of integrity to practice in a country that restricts abortion according to someone else’s idea of right and wrong. But the dilemma suddenly feels more desperate. Every time I yank my kids back from a curb or bear-hug them through a flu shot, I whisper fiercely, “My most important job is to keep you healthy and safe.” I have the same duty to my patients—a duty I’ll have to fulfill while, in all likelihood, a vaccine conspiracy theorist with no public health training runs one or more of the nation’s public health agencies, and while a violence-inciting president rules a country where men shoot women and children so regularly that it often doesn’t even make the news.
My daughter, now six, recently shared with us her first-grade teacher’s definition of integrity: “doing the right thing even when no one is watching.” It’s an excellent definition for a six-year-old. But it leaves at least one adult wondering how to define “right” in a country in which the opportunities for fulfilling my most sacred duties—as a doctor, a parent, a citizen—are rapidly disappearing.
