The women whom my daughter, photojournalist Ilana Panich-Linsman, photographed in 2021 could be anyone—your neighbor, college professor, doctor, or mother.
They are women who sought, with great difficulty, to terminate pregnancies as young women between 1958 and early 1973, when abortion was mostly illegal in the United States. Nine of these procedures took place in the U.S. and one in Nogales, Mexico. They were high school girls or young college students; two married right out of high school.
Almost all the women are now mothers and grandmothers. Among them are businesswomen, an immigration lawyer, a retired physician, a former Peace Corps volunteer, a professor and leader in the reproductive justice movement, and a writer and filmmaker.
Most of the women in this series
