Vikki Brown, 33, who works in education in New Orleans, says she initially tried to end her pregnancy in Louisiana. When she called her gynecologist for advice, a receptionist said she was "disgusted" by the request. Brown sought out the lone abortion clinic operating in New Orleans but found it besieged with both protesters and patients. "I knew but didn't understand how difficult it was to get care," says Brown, who moved to Louisiana in 2010 from New York City. "The clinic was absolutely full. People were sitting on the floor. It was swamped." It took her six hours to get an ultrasound, which cost $150, she says.

The coronavirus had started to shut much of the country down in March 2020 when Larada Lee found out she was six weeks pregnant. She wanted to end her pregnancy and decided that instead of a surgical abortion, she would use medication, a process she could complete at home. This, she thought, was her best chance of limiting her exposure to Covid-19.

Kay Winston was just two months postpartum when she found out she was pregnant again. After discussing the unexpected pregnancy and her options with her fiancé, Winston decided to have an abortion. “It was the very first abortion that I had, and I had a perspective that was very blind,” the 27-year-old from Texas tells Marie Claire. “I was just going off what I knew, what people told me, [and] what I did and didn’t see on television. And I was scared.”

As a non-binary transgender person, my abortion experience led to a lot of gender dysphoria. Every clinic had the word women’s in the name, all the pamphlets used gendered language and featured images of gender-conforming people, and clinicians were kind but didn’t understand trans and non-binary experiences. It felt dehumanizing. I had to emotionally disconnect from the experience entirely because of how gendered it was.

Republicans have started to blur the lines between birth control and abortion in the hopes of making it harder for American women to get both birth control and abortions. And nowhere is this clearer than in the Missouri statehouse, where lawmakers debated whether they needed to restrict Medicaid coverage of birth control and limit payments to Planned Parenthood. Yes, as the Kansas City Star reported, lawmakers there spent hours last week in a discussion that “resembled a remedial sex-education course.” It was a tricky play, attacking birth control as a way to attack abortion, and it didn’t work…this time.

CoWanda Rusk was weeks away from graduating from her Texas high school, and preparing for college, when she learned she was pregnant. "I immediately knew I didn't want to be pregnant," she recounted to Salon. Rusk had grown up a part of the church where her father was a youth pastor, and she remains a person of faith to this day. "I always rely on my faith for everything, even small decisions — what colors to wear today, what will align with the universe today," she said.

As states continue to introduce, and in many instances pass, anti-abortion laws that would further deny pregnant people from exercising their constitutional right, abortion storytellers are leading the fight to protect and expand access to care. And it comes as no surprise that these storytellers are often young, Black, brown, Indigenous, and LGBTQ+ people and are continuing the work of the Black and brown advocates who came before them.

“I’m thankful that I had my abortion, and I’m worried that people won’t be able to live [their] lives as my abortion has afforded me,” said Bracey Sherman, the founder and executive director of We Testify, an organization dedicated to the leadership and representation of people who have abortions.

Last October, abortion advocate Brittany Mostiller spoke at a virtual rally hosted by then-vice presidential candidate Kamala D. Harris. In hopes that the Biden administration would advocate for Congress to repeal the Hyde Amendment, a provision in the federal budget that bars Medicaid from covering the cost of abortion in most cases, Mostiller told her abortion story.

When Stephanie Loraine Piñeiro was 17, she found out she was pregnant. Loraine Piñeiro decided to have an abortion, but because she was a Medicaid recipient — like more than 72 million other Americans — her insurance wouldn’t cover the costs of the procedure. So, Loraine Piñeiro picked up extra shifts at her restaurant job, earning $2.17 per hour in base pay, to earn the necessary $450. She was still in high school.