When she refused to name the person who had performed the abortion, police officers arrested her. Ms. Wheeler was convicted of manslaughter — a crime with a possible 20-year sentence. The court, however, sentenced her to two years of probation and forbade her to stay out overnight, go to a bar or associate with people “of harmful character or bad reputation.” The court also gave her this ultimatum: Marry the man she was living with in Florida or leave the state in no more than a week and return to North Carolina to live with a different man, her brother.

Ms. Wheeler, whose conviction was later overturned, was not alone in being arrested for having an abortion before Roe, but it is true that such arrests were not common. It’s unlikely, however, that would be the case today because our current legal system — radically expanded through the war on drugs — is profoundly different from the one we lived with when Roe was decided.

In the 1970s, the United States imprisoned approximately 300,000 people, almost all of them men. Today, American prisons and jails hold more than 2.2 million people, and 4.5 million more people are under some form of criminal justice supervision, such as probation and parole.

This is not the result of population growth. Between 1970 and 2000, the American population rose by less than 40 percent, yet the number of inmates rose by more than 500 percent. Today, more than 200,000 women are behind bars, in both jails and prisons, and more than one million women are on probation or parole. Looking just at prisons, there has been more than a 1,700 percent increase in incarceration of women since 1973. The majority of them are black and brown.

But we don’t have to just imagine future arrests. Such arrests are happening already.

Some states still have pre-Roe laws on their books that specifically authorize prosecution of women who have abortions. In 2011, Jennie Linn McCormack, a pregnant mother of three who lived in southeastern Idaho, used medications she obtained online to carry out an abortion at home. She was charged with violating an Idaho law that makes it a felony for a woman to perform her own abortion. Nearly four months after Ms. McCormack was charged, a state court dismissed the criminal complaint, but in a way that left open the possibility that she could be charged again. Ms. McCormack brought suit in federal court challenging Idaho laws that could be used to punish her for having an abortion. She prevailed. (My organization filed an amicus brief on her behalf.)