Editor’s Note: Claudia Dreifus contributes to the New York Times, the New York Review of Books and the Nation. She also teaches journalism to graduate students in the sciences at Columbia University. The views expressed in this commentary are her own. View more opinion on CNN.

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On Friday, members of the right to life movement converged on Washington to mark the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. They were also celebrating last June’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision which abrogated it.

Among my friends – many of them veterans of the 1970s women’s rights campaigns – there’s no celebration.

The Roe decision of January 22, 1973, effectively legalized abortion throughout the United States. On a human level, it freed women of child-bearing age from the pain and danger of illegal abortion.

I went to college in the pre-Roe era of the early 1960s. I still remember what it was like to be a young woman in a time when malfunctioning birth control could destroy one’s future.

If that happened, illegal abortion—often in the underground world of criminality and with physical danger—was, for most of us, the only option.

Young people are sexual; young people get pregnant. In my college circle, one routinely heard the most horrific stories: operations in motel rooms, surgeries without anesthesia, abortionists who’d raped women seeking their services. Strange as it seems today: this was common. I had a friend who developed a pelvic infection after a back-alley abortion; she was rendered infertile.

I found myself pregnant in 1964. I was 19. At first, I tried to self-abort. I failed. A friend of my mother’s connected me with a doctor in Pennsylvania.

On the way there, I felt terrified. What if he wasn’t a genuine physician? Would I contract an infection like my friend did? The thought that I might die kept repeating itself. As I drove through the bleak January landscape of rural Pennsylvania, I thought “Whatever the risks, you must do this. There’s no turning back.”

I’d drawn the lucky card. He turned out to be a real physician. I had the operation under anesthesia and with proper medication. He provided abortions because he believed in it, never charging more than $100. His community protected him.

At the end of a very long day, the doctor handed me a packet of birth control pills and said, “I don’t want to see you here again.”

At that moment, my life began anew. My future was mine. Today, I am a professor and a writer. None of that would have been possible if, as a teenager, I’d been forced to have a child.

I’ve been reliving all of this since the Dobbs decision was announced. After Roe, so many of us believed that the era of backroom abortion was forever gone. We couldn’t imagine a society where rights, once granted, could be rescinded.

Yet here we are. The Guttmacher Institute, which collects data on reproductive matters, notes that since Dobbs was decided, some 24 states “have banned abortion or are likely to do so.”

Today, for the first time in half a century, one hears stories that echo experiences in the bad old days.

There are some differences, of course. Birth control options are more plentiful and widely accessible. And abortion is not entirely underground—it remains fully legal in more than half of all states and in the District of Columbia. But in those entities with new restrictions, health care for women—whether they seek an abortion or not—has been compromised.

In multiple states, doctors frankly are scared. State laws are changing. Lawyers and judges are making decisions about whether or not women – and in some cases young girls – can get the care their doctors know they need. Women are afraid of being investigated if they suffer a miscarriage. Politicians are advocating for abortion to be declared homicide.

Meanwhile, people who use the drug Methotrexate for rheumatoid arthritis are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain. The medication can induce miscarriage. Pharmacists fear that under post-Dobbs laws, they can be prosecuted for dispensing it.

The current landscape is especially disheartening for women of my generation and terrifying for women of childbearing age. But it’s also important to remember that the Roe decision of 1973 happened in a context of a wider societal expansion of women’s rights – and that the fight isn’t over.

In the 1970s, women were demanding equal access to male-dominated professions, an end to discrimination in education and, above everything, fairness from the law. In those years, I remember feeling that for women, it was a completely new chapter.

What Roe did was enable women to decide if and when they’d have children. That made the progress in work, education and personal relationships possible. It’s not a coincidence that recent research shows that women living in states with abortion bans contend with greater economic insecurity.

Does the Dobbs decision mean that the era of gender progress is now over? Not necessarily. Since Dobbs, state legislators, particularly in red states, have been falling over each other to enact new laws restricting access. But these moves are unpopular—especially with the millions of Americans who’ve benefited from legal abortion.

In five states, voters have defeated anti-abortion initiatives on the ballot.

This past November, the US Senate stayed Democratic, in part because of voter anger about abortion restrictions.

On a less formal level, as in the past, Americans are finding creative ways to circumvent the new limitations. In Texas, where a plethora of draconian laws have been enacted, many women are now going to Mexico for their gynecological care. In blue states, clinics have expanded to accommodate women from neighboring jurisdictions seeking abortions.

Of course, travel takes money. Many of the most restrictive states are among the poorest—Mississippi, Alabama, Oklahoma. NGOs like The Brigid Alliance and local pro-abortion funds provide travel expenses for women in need, but they can’t possibly meet the demand. Yet, they are an indispensable lifeline for as many as they are able to help – as is the corporate support available for some workers to travel out of state for abortions.

As the fight continues, supporters of reproductive rights shouldn’t underestimate the determination of the anti-abortion community. Fifty years ago, they vowed to undo Roe v. Wade. For a half century, they marched and lobbied and saw to it that sympathetic conservatives were appointed to the Supreme Court.

And so, after decades of persistent work, their efforts bore fruit on June 24, 2022, when Justice Samuel Alito, writing on behalf of the six conservatives on the high court, opined, “we hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision.” Writing for the seven-justice majority 50 years ago in Roe v. Wade, Justice Harry Blackmun found that the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause provides a fundamental “right to privacy” that protects the liberty of pregnant individuals to abort.

In the pro-choice moment from which Roe emerged, few thought that what happened in Dobbs could ever occur.

As a journalist, I try to avoid taking partisan positions. However, this issue is personal. I’m still haunted by that trip to Pennsylvania and how frightened I was. Today I have students and friends who are just beginning to move into their promising futures. It hurts to think that they might experience the same suffering that was so routine for my cohort.