Critical tears in our social fabric often descend to the status of"issues," become shorthand phrases or even just acronyms ... while the dirty, difficult impacts on actual human lives go unremarked.
In Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, writer Shefali Luthra has taken mostly the less visible and often rougher road of recounting how a massive policy change made by players in D.C. and certain statehouses actually played out among the Americans those decisions were intended to affect. They affected them, all right, but often in unexpected and frequently tragic ways.
As the title indicates, the issue is abortion, and specifically what happened in the lives of many people - those who were pregnant, working as medical or administrative personnel or in other roles - as the law surrounding what was legal, and wasn't, kept changing at blinding speed.
Many of the impacts are what you might imagine, but many - as emerges through the detailed reporting here - are less obvious. The effects in states where abortion is wholly or almost completely banned might not surprise, but some of the impacts on the still-legal states might: Massively swamped health facilities that limit the ability of patients (for abortion and other health treatments) to obtain care. Some of those challenges might ease up in time as resources shift location, but the unknowns are many.
There are some important impacts that seem to have escaped, at least mostly, news media and other journalistic attention. One example is the effect of abortion bans on medical education; in ban states, medical schooling for many areas of health - not only abortion, and not only reproductive health, but many subjects beyond - will be impaired. The training of a generation of physicians in something close to half the country is about to be badly damaged.
The individual stories are gripping; the tension and risk involved is (in the reading) novelistic.
And like any good book about social changes, there's a nod to what lies ahead. Luthra doesn't, course, try to produce a crystal ball; we'd have to know for sure what the results of November's general elections will be before we could even hazard a guess.
But while Luthra's story may for now lack a second act, the lessons from the first are evident: A lot of people are likely to be badly damaged, and probably will die, as long as our current path is unchanged.