The Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade sent shock waves through our community. Rarely has a single policy decision affected medical practice in such an immediate and high-stakes way.
As the legal and clinical implications of this new world compound, clinicians providing abortion care are suffering an avalanche of moral injury on a daily basis. Some have expressed fear of being charged with a crime for delivering the standard of care or distress at having to withhold it. Many are being forced to create new policies and workflows that contradict patients’ best interests. Some have found a renewed sense of political engagement. Others are frustrated that fellow citizens are only now waking up to the reality of what has been in the works for a very long time.
All of us at The Nocturnists are grieving the impact of this ruling on Americans’ reproductive freedom, and want to do whatever we can to ensure that the voices of healthcare workers figure prominently in the ongoing public discourse, which is usually dominated by politicians and media personalities with variable medical literacy.
So, we launched a new storytelling project – The Nocturnists: Post-Roe America – to document the ramifications of the Dobbs Decision on the lives and practices of healthcare workers. Over the past year, we’ve been collecting stories from clinicians from red, blue, and purple states about the impact of this ruling on clinical practice.
To get the project underway, in July 2022 we released a special conversation on The Nocturnists podcast between Emily and our Executive Producer, family medicine physician and abortion provider Dr. Alison Block, who recently published an Op-Ed in The New York Times called "Why I Learned to Perform Second-Trimester Abortions for a Post-Roe America." In this conversation, Ali speaks beautifully about the reality of abortion care on the ground, and the challenges we’re up against as we work to reinstate the right to choose for people across America.
