After Dobbs, pro-choice advocates have emphasized women in medical crises. But those tragic cases are a limited picture

A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.

Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist