Three years ago, the fall of Roe v. Wade coincided with a more personal deadline. I would soon turn 35 years old, which meant, according to the internet, that my ovaries were going to dry up and float away. If I did conceive, I would have a “geriatric pregnancy,” and everything about it would be complicated. This is not exactly true, as I learned later on. Doctors now prefer the term “advanced maternal age,” and pregnancy after 35 is neither unusual or universally complex. My gynecologist told me that although the average woman’s fertility does begin to decline in her mid-30s, lots of women have babies when they’re older, and they don’t all need IVF. I asked her to remove my IUD and to prescribe the birth-control pill. I wanted a child, but only if I could decide when or how or why I might have one. Forced birth troubled me far more than a childless life, and still does. After Roe came Project 2025 and new proposals to restrict the reproductive liberties of women.

By the time the Supreme Court destroyed Roe, I’d been out of the Evangelical church for well over a decade, and it had taken me roughly that long to decide that I might want children. At first I abhorred motherhood because I thought it was another trap, like marriage. All the sermons and the radio shows and the books told me the same thing. My body did not belong to me; it was bound for a strange fate. The Bible said that if I got married, my husband and I would become, in a Cronenberg-like image, “one flesh.” If pregnancy followed, as it should, the body horror would never end. Through marriage and then motherhood, I would tie myself to the same man for life, even if he hit me and our children. I felt more detached from my flesh as adolescence progressed and became obsessed with nuns, who seemed above worldly attention.

That is not quite how life works, inside or outside a convent. No one is a being of pure intellect. The body will intrude, and mine did; I didn’t want to be celibate, and I didn’t want to be Christian, either. I fell in love with a man who did not want to be a household tyrant and married him. Later I decided that I did want children, but only with him, because with him motherhood would not be a trap. He does not expect me to adopt “the hidden life of a stay-at-home mom,” as the Evangelical author Stasi Eldredge so approvingly described it. But our choices are narrowing, casualties of the very authoritarianism I tried to escape.

When I left the faith in my early 20s I thought I could make a clean break, but there was nowhere to hide. The ideas and people that once governed my life were everywhere, gaining influence and power at an inexorable pace. As a child I’d feared demonic possession almost more than anything else. Evil spirits were real in that world, and if you weren’t right with God, they could inhabit you and control you until someone holy cast them out. I would lie awake for hours at night, trying to confess all my sins so that I would be in fellowship with God and safe from Satan’s torment. Demons are not real, but I was right to perceive danger: My mind and body were and remain under threat from more prosaic forces. The day Roe fell, I could........

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