1969, the last year when abortion was still illegal in Hawaii, I was a community organizer in Kalihi-Palama, collaborating with Native Hawaiians, Samoans, Filipinos. Heart-wrenching decisions were being made.

The choice for a young, single woman was to have her reputation ruined for being pregnant or to have a back-alley abortion. Or if she was a married woman who had an unintentional pregnancy and was without adequate childcare and/or didn’t know how she could function and/or just couldn’t afford another child, she also would suffer through the trauma of a back-alley abortion. Those who performed the abortions were at risk of losing their career and facing criminal prosecution.

It felt like a dirty secret. Some of us became sterile; some of us almost died from hemorrhaging; some of us did die.

I’m angry and I’m heartbroken with Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which would overturn Roe v. Wade. Not a word about how being able to obtain an abortion has allowed so many to have a career, to take adequate care of the children they already have.

So many do not know life without Roe. It is going to be low-income women, Black and brown women, who are going to be impacted the most. Women with money can travel to states such as Hawaii and can afford to have an abortion. So, this is a question of racial justice.

Post-Roe America will not look like pre-Roe America. Before Roe, women were rarely prosecuted for abortion, though they were sometimes threatened with prosecution to get them to testify against abortion providers. Roe itself meant that fetal endangerment and fetal homicide laws didn’t apply to women having abortions. Once Roe is gone, women who terminated their pregnancies are likely to be treated as killers.

Dobbs is about Controlling Women — a giant step backward for women as free people in America. Women have been second-class citizens since this country was founded in 1776.

Bans on abortion have never stopped abortions. Even the people with the least autonomy and most draconian circumstances in American history —enslaved people — were known to use cotton root bark.

About 40% of women who have abortions every year are living in states that are likely to ban abortions. It means hundreds of thousands of women who are facing unintended pregnancy will be affected by these bans. They can’t exercise decisions about when, where and with whom they have children. They will have to travel long distances, sometimes 200 up to 1,000 miles, to obtain appropriate care, which has severe jeopardy to their health.

Now, the era of basic human rights and dignity for women is being ripped to shreds. The court no longer considers applying the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to be sufficient to support women’s rights, since these privacy rights weren’t in the original Constitution itself. Alito’s draft ruling rests on the argument that “the constitution makes no reference to abortion and no such right is implicitly protected,” taking us back to the time of the Founding Fathers when women were considered barely more than the property of their fathers and husbands.

There is no telling what other rights this fundamentalist court will take away in order to get us back to the Founding Fathers: from birth control to gay marriage to interracial marriage to voting rights — the many rights that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution.

Yet we, not the government, get to make decisions about our own lives. The right to privacy, the right to make our own medical decisions is what this is about.

By electing pro-reproductive freedom candidates in the mid-terms, we can federally codify Roe into law, the Women’s Health Protection Act, to protect a woman’s right to choose. Otherwise, we will have forced birth in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate, uneven paid maternity leave and no universal subsidized child care.

Elizabeth Jubin Fujiwara is a Honolulu civil rights attorney.