This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm here today with my colleague Gia Tolentino.

Hi, David. So I recently talked to a young woman who I'm going to call Jane.

I guess you could say I was the golden child.

So she would always talk so bad about my sister saying, oh, she got pregnant so young,

she doesn't know how to take care of it, this and that. And then she'll turn around and tell

her friends, oh, my other daughter, she's so amazing. She has AP classes. She's a star student,

so much and so on.

So I knew it would be so hard for me to come up to my mom and kind of just drop that bombshell and tell her, hey, I'm pregnant.

Jane is from Texas, which is where I grew up.

And in the 90s in Texas, as with now, sex ed is not mandatory in school.

And when it is taught, state law requires that abstinence be stressed as the preferred method of birth control.

And we all know how well that works.

I remember growing up, abortion was talked about unequivocally as murder.

We did want a kid, but then again, we just couldn't afford it. I was still in school.

I was barely about to end school. I was about to graduate, so it was just so close. It was just that fear of we're not going to be able to give it the life that we would want to give it.

Hundreds of thousands of people seek abortions every year, each for their own reasons. But at this

moment, the Supreme Court is weighing cases that seek to end the constitutional right to abortion

that was established almost a half century ago. That is the subject of our entire program today.

Conservative states like Texas have been making it harder to get an abortion for years decades really

they've taken measures to narrow a time frame in which a woman can end a pregnancy to complicate the process of getting an appointment to restrict how and when clinics operate with the idea that many of those clinics will eventually shut down jane was 17 and in high school when she got pregnant, she had an after-school job at a fast

food restaurant.

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