Last month, at a pro-choice rally in my hometown located 20 minutes north of New York City, my mother took the megaphone for the first time in her life and said “I’ve had two abortions.”

I had known this about my mother since childhood, who would mention the abortions to me and my sister in passing, without explanation or shame. Abortion was part of what allowed my family to be a tight-knit quartet, and this knowledge existed somewhere in the back of each of our minds without ever having to be explicitly said.

Perhaps this is why I chose Obstetrics and Gynecology as my field of practice. Perhaps my ambition, resting atop my love of surgery, of hard work and hand work, could only bloom in the fertile field of reproductive rights. Without the ability to get an abortion, should I have needed one, I would never have been equal to my male colleagues. This had always been clear to me, but when it came time to choose a specialty, it was not enough to merely possess this right; I had to enforce it for others.

So I went to the South Side of Chicago, where I saw them all: the teenager who drove from Indiana because her father “would kill” her if he found out; the 43-year-old who thought she couldn’t get pregnant anymore; the woman who cried and cried when an ultrasound showed a lethal anomaly; the person who changed her mind; the 32-year-old who lost most of her blood and almost her life; the woman who had been raped; the woman who had been raped; the woman who had been raped; the 16-year-old with the gymnastics career; the 22-year-old with a young child at home; the already-mothers and almost-mothers — I saw them all.

And then, of course, it happened. Roe v. Wade was overturned in a 6-to-3 decision on Friday, June 24, by the Supreme Court of the United States. And though I am one small person whose day-to-day life will only change a little, the impact of the news gutted me. On a practical level, I will see more patients who travel to Illinois for abortion care. I will see more mothers die from preventable illnesses. I will keep doing my job. But a central part of me has disappeared overnight after a long and hard fight to cling to it. It’s the part that trusted I could be safe in my body, and the part that believed I could be equal in my work.

In its place, I feel grief. I feel grief for my patients who will suffer and for the ones who will even die.

I feel grief for my colleagues, whose training has been invalidated with the sweep of a judicial pen. I feel grief for the medical students who come to me for advice (“should I choose Ob/Gyn?”) and for my past self, who chose a path with precious little sleep and difficult patient outcomes all for a cause that would lose more and more footing with each passing month.

And I feel grief for my mother, who is brave for 9 million reasons, her abortions being the least of them. Who chose to stand in front of a crowd and tell them she had had two abortions. Two abortions that, very shortly, will be illegal in 26 states. Two abortions that gave her family life, and allowed for joy and enabled her daughter to grow into the proud abortion provider I am today. It is only in her bravery that I can derive hope in the aftermath of this sickening decision. Only in the fact of being her daughter that I can continue to care for the mothers of this movement.

Alessandra Hirsch (alessandra.hirsch@uchospitals.edu) is a resident physician in Ob/Gyn at the University of Chicago.