She Just Had a Baby. Soon, She'll Start 7th Grade.

I asked her what was wrong, and she said she didn’t want to tell me.” (To protect the privacy of a juvenile rape survivor, TIME is using pseudonyms to refer to Ashley and Regina; Peanut is the baby’s nickname.)

When Emory University researcher Ariana Traub surveyed almost 500 third- and fourth-year medical students in 2022, close to 80% said that abortion laws influenced where they planned to apply to residency.

And so Dobbs has compounded America's maternal-health crisis: more women are delivering more babies, in areas where there are already not enough doctors to care for them, while abortion bans are making it more difficult to recruit qualified providers to the regions that need them most.

Although it is technically possible to obtain DNA from a fetus, police are often reluctant to initiate an invasive procedure on a pregnant victim, says Phillip Danielson, a professor of forensic genetics at the University of Denver.

The trip can be hard even for local residents: the roads leading to the clinic don’t have good sidewalks, and temperatures in the Delta regularly reach 100 degrees in the summer.

But a pregnant woman with any complication at all—from deep-vein thrombosis to diabetes, preeclampsia to advanced maternal age—will have to make a three-hour round trip drive to Memphis to see the closest maternal-fetal-medicine specialist.