"Pregnancy and birthing have always been a way of obliterating the self," Katie Gutierrez wrote in "How I lost myself to motherhood," a brilliant essay in this week's Time magazine.

"Many of us emerge with painfully shifted bones, dysfunctional organs, incontinence, stitches and scars, all of which change our relationship to physicality. From 6% to 20% of new mothers suffer from postpartum depression, while 1-in-3 feel high anxiety levels either during pregnancy or in the postpartum period. Sleeplessness clouds our intellectual facilities, blunts our creativity and whittles our patience.

"My second pregnancy, like my first, was debilitating painful, and I bled for three-months after having our son. He didn't sleep through the night for 15-months, a sentence so banal it can't possibly convey the despair of being awaken to screams every few hours for more than a year. He is also prone to respiratory infections, so until until Omnicron cases started falling in our city this March, we mostly stayed home.

"There I was, screaming into a pillow at 3-a.m. because the baby was crying again. There I was, smothering frustration that felt too close to rage as my daughter refused to eat dinner but asked for a snack the moment I sat down to work. Meanwhile, new qualities emerged: a deep fear of the world outside our door, rage at the politicized approach to public health, a well of cynicism in my formerly open heart. All of it left me feeling like a stranger to myself. I yelled, then apologized, sick with shame. What's wrong with me? I often thought. Who am I?

"I was a mother. My body was theirs to feed from and climb on, my mind consumed with keeping them safe, healthy and loved, and consumed with anger at myself every time I failed. I may have been a full-time mother, but without the ability to live in the self I'd created apart from motherhood, I was not the one they deserve.

Now that our daughter is in school, our son sleeps through the night, and we're venturing out more, I'm slowly carving a path back to my mind and body. As I do, I see flashes of the mom I want to be. But this isn't a happy ending.

"Because the past two years, in which mothers left the workforce in record numbers to handle childcare and are now suffering a mental-health crisis, are a damning preview of what's to come if Roe vs. Wade is overturned:

"People with uteri forced to sacrifice themselves to a role the U.S. deems more important than our ambition, our own actual lives, yet will not support at any point.

"I live in Texas, which has effectively already banned abortion, and from where I sit, it's easy to see the worst-case scenarios:

"an increase in America's abominable maternal death rate, women criminalized not just for self-managing abortion but for miscarriages and stillbirths, cycles and poverty and abuse continuing unabated.

"The best case scenario? What I, and so many others, have lived through: a complete loss of selfhood. I can't help thinking that's the point."