If You Know A Kid About To Go To College In A State With Abortion Restrictions, Read This

As we cross the border into the conservative state in which my older daughter attends college, she often snaps a photo of the state line.

“I’ll just leave my reproductive rights here until I come home for break,” she’ll say, with a sigh.

She was a sophomore when the Dobbs decision was leaked, and called me, devastated, from her dorm room. I warned her to quickly delete the smartphone app she used to track her menstrual cycle and reminded her that she does not need to answer any doctor’s questions about the date of her last period. I was immediately anxious about what the red state in which she was studying might begin to track.

The next fall, the school’s student government bought hundreds and hundreds of doses of Plan B and Ella “morning-after” pills, which can be used as emergency contraception, assuming you fall within the weight limit. There was little else they could do; the state had already begun the process of outlawing abortions.

By August of 2023, abortion in the state would be completely illegal, but even before then, it was effectively impossible anyway. Doctors didn’t want to take the risk. My daughter covered her computer and her bulletin board in pro-choice slogans, made phone calls for pro-choice candidates in the 2022 election, and kept picking her reproductive rights up at the border on her way home, posting a Snapchat of a cartoon uterus waving at her from the state line.

As college acceptance letters come in this winter, some young people will, as my daughter did, choose schools in anti-choice states. I’ve learned a lot since Dobbs about how to plan for my children’s health care from afar, a part of college planning that would never have occurred to me three years ago. Now I know that, in some