His job? To protect women from pro-life protesters.

“I think the fact that this feels like a visceral horror to some women — though not all — and then is used as an excuse to write disgusting legislation is awful. But I don’t know that the solution is to not talk about it.”

A bracing essay on late-term abortion, and how American politics have made an impossibly difficult situation even more painful and dangerous for women.

An obituary of Norma McCorvey, aka “Jane Roe,” the plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that yielded the legalization of abortion. McCorvey later became a born-again Christian, had a change of heart, revised parts of her story including recanting the part about having become pregnant while being raped, and became an anti-abortion activist.

Increasingly, states are making it illegal for women to get an abortion after 20 weeks — which happens to be right around the time many women find out their pregnancies aren’t viable.

“I also think that people assume that women do this casually — that they’ve known they were pregnant for thirty weeks and then were on their way down to the hair salon and they saw the abortion clinic and they decided to just walk in to avoid the inconveniences of motherhood. That also is completely untrue. No matter how available birth control and first-trimester and second-trimester abortion is, you are always going to have the need for later abortions. A woman would never do this casually.”

When an expectant mom learned, at 31 weeks, that her fetus was “incompatible with life,” she flew to Colorado to get a shot that would start the process of a third-trimester abortion, then returned to New York to finish the delivery.

“It was naïve of me to believe that the ideology Esperanza expressed in class during our debates would carry over into real life. That I would even think to intervene in a family, especially between a mother and daughter, and about a topic as sensitive as abortion, was presumptuous—maybe even unethical.”

The obstacles run the gamut—from government regulation to banks that won’t give loans to clinics—but their effective is cumulative. Winter looks at why so many clinics have been forced to shut the doors.