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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-thirties, 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 twenties 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 almost hear the trap snap shut. I want children, and I want a choice, and I don’t know how much longer I can have either.Motherhood has never been completely optional in the United States. From the sexual violence inflicted on Black women in slavery to the eugenics era to our own post-Roe moment, reproduction is too often a matter of force. Outside the legal realm, women are subject to other and sometimes subtler forms of coercion. Parents may demand grandchildren. Churches may demand a quiver full of arrows for the Lord. No pastor ever told me that I must have babies whether I wanted them or not, but when motherhood is a high calling, perhaps even the highest, it is not really a “calling” at all. The line between an expectation and an obligation is not so robust. There did not seem to be a way to square my ambitions with my anatomy, at least within my church, so I left – only to discover a secular world beset by a similar dilemma. Could women really have it all? Back then the answer was maybe, as long as you’re rich, and that is still mostly true. In fact, I suspect it is more true now than it was in 2012. Choice was always a luxury and the right is poised to make it rarer still.

I knew that when I ran out of birth control on a trip this year and decided not to refill it. The timing is not perfect, but I am 37 now and that makes me older than Taylor Swift, whose engagement thrilled the prurient right. “Pregnancy is contagious,” posted Tim Carney of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “Familism and Natalism are conveyed culturally. If Kelce and Swift have kids and quickly, this could trigger a Baby Boom.” Others said the 35 year-old Swift might encourage young women to delay marriage and pregnancy, which is a problem. As the writer Michael Brendan Dougherty put it, “If she got pregnant today, medically it would qualify as a ‘geriatric pregnancy.’” I don’t know if Swift wants kids, and I don’t care, either. Her choices have no bearing on mine and I doubt they will influence anyone else. (Her endorsement of Kamala Harris for president did not exactly shift the needle.) People make reproductive decisions for all kinds of reasons, but to the right-wing, women are automatons. Program us correctly, and we will spit out babies.

In April, the New York Times reported that pronatalists had pitched the Trump White house on various solutions. Perhaps a $5,000 baby bonus will do the trick? Or a tax credit? Simone and Malcolm Collins – the “techo-Puritan” couple who appear in every story on pronatalism as if by dark magic – suggested a National Medal of Motherhood for women who have more than six kids. Some on the right prefer to speak of family formation, not the mere act of birth,  because it is not enough for a woman to have a baby. She should have a baby at the right age with a man in a specific household structure, and then she should do it again, no matter the cost to her personal or professional dreams. There’s something unnatural about a woman who tries to have it “all,” so a number of Republicans and conservative advocates want us back in the home. The right-leaning Institute for Family Studies recently published an article by commentator Maria Baer, who complained, “Framing ‘having it all’ as an economic project, with little consideration to what our kids need and deserve, is not only shortsighted. It implies that the selflessness of motherhood is somehow beneath us.”

Evangelicals like to speak of dying to one’s self, though in my experience it’s women who usually make the sacrifice. When Eldredge wrote of a mother’s “hidden life” in her best-selling book, Captivating, she celebrated a woman who, in her words, had chosen “to die a thousand small deaths to herself every single day, while at the same time falling ever more in love with her son.” A good woman knows her place and with it, her function. Desire has nothing to do with it.  If she is merely “the kind of person that other people come out of,” as far-right pastor Doug Wilson told CNN last month, she has no self at all. In Wilson’s ideal country, she would not even have the right to vote. She is a womb, and little more. A meatsack doesn’t need the franchise.

What happens, then, if the meatsack malfunctions? Not long after Wilson spoke to CNN, I visited my gynecologist. I’ve been exhausted since I stopped taking birth control, and my cycles are never on time. Though I haven’t been trying to get pregnant for long, I felt, keenly, that something was not right. On the Friday before Labor Day, I got a call from the doctor’s office. My bloodwork was abnormal.

My test results are consistent with polycystic ovarian syndrome, though a specialist still needs to confirm. Women with PCOS can and do conceive all the time, but at my age, it will be more difficult, and the chances are higher that I’ll need intervention. I had not wanted to undergo IVF, not that anyone does, and now it’s a real possibility. In the week or so since I got the call I have tried unsuccessfully to get an appointment with an endocrinologist, and I have poured over incomprehensible health insurance documents to find out what my benefits might possibly cover. One night I lost it, and sobbed until I got snot in my hair. The next day I read in the Washington Post that the Heritage Foundation is developing a “Manhattan Project” for making babies. The draft paper rejects “extraordinary technical solutions” like IVF because they may create “a world of artificial wombs and custom lab-created babies on demand.” This is infuriating but I find a certain bleak humor in it, too. Am I supposed to have babies? Or am I not supposed to have babies? I can’t win, and neither can anyone else.

In a previous report, Heritage analysts claimed that “restorative reproductive medicine” can treat the underlying causes of infertility. Women in my situation might consider “the women’s health science of NaProTechnology” instead of IVF, they stated. A July piece in the Free Press reads like a press release for NaPro and accepts its evidentiary claims without skepticism. Alas, the problem with NaPro is that it is unscientific bullshit, as is RRM itself. Dr. Thomas Hilgers, the creator of NaPro and a devout Catholic, says his protocol is more effective than IVF, but reproductive scientists dispute his claims. Hilgers “is not practicing evidence-based, 21st-century Western medicine,” Dr. Richard Paulson of the University of Southern California told Mother Jones in 2017. RRM “appears to be a political rather than a scientific concept,” a spokesperson for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine told MedPage Today last year. Yet proponents find a sympathetic audience in the White House. Emma Waters, a senior research associate at Heritage, recently celebrated “a historic political moment” at an event co-hosted by her employer and the MAHA Institute. The Trump administration and its allies “are directly spotlighting family formation, real reproductive health and root cause infertility care as national priorities,” she added. Except they aren’t, and they won’t.

When I learned I might have PCOS, I asked myself questions that have no definitive answers. Like: Would I have tried earlier, if I’d known? It’s possible, but also, I’m not sure the diagnosis would have changed my mind. I had so many reasons to wait. My husband and I have student loan debt and we live in one of the most expensive cities in the country, but I don’t regret my education, or my career, or my decision to move to New York. I had – and have – no interest in a “hidden life,” as Eldredge called it. After growing up in a home ruled by male anger and male whims, I wanted to be certain I had not exchanged one trap for another. Autonomy is a kind of security. I figured I would never be a perfect mother but I thought I could be a good one, once I became a bit more patient, and a bit less depressed. A child is not an ideological token, or a replacement for therapy, or a mere extension of her parents. I do not want to have a child in order to make myself feel good or to rescue what’s left of the welfare state. Probably most of us don’t. I like the idea of raising a person. I want to introduce someone to the work of Ursula K. Le Guin and the pleasures of a sunny day in autumn. I hope they’ll be free in ways I’ve never known.

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