“Please, I need info on how to get the pills to do [an abortion] at home,” one woman wrote.

“I have considered suicide,” another messaged. “If [my boyfriend] finds out about me being pregnant, God only knows what will happen. He is a violent, angry person, so I need some help.”

“I need the pills bc I…can’t travel that far,” a third woman emailed. “I live [in] Mississippi where I can’t find a doctor. Please help!”

Has it come to this? How did women end up so desperate—even willing to break the law to get an abortion? And what does the new landscape mean for our health? Our rights? Our power as women?

Running Out of Options

For years pro-choice advocates have worried about what might happen if Roe v. Wade were overturned—whether women wanting to end their pregnancies would resort to the back-alley doctors and coat hangers of past eras. What we’ve learned is that it didn’t take such a monumental legal flip-flop to make that a real possibility: In the past five years, highly restrictive Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP) state laws have shut down at least 162 clinics or stopped them from terminating pregnancies, and made both surgical and medical abortions incredibly expensive and time-consuming in many areas. As a result, some women are taking matters into their own hands, a phenomenon that, experts say, will only become more common if the Supreme Court upholds Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt when the ruling is handed down this summer. It’s considered the most important reproductive-rights case in more than 20 years because it could decide how far states can go to control abortion care.

The first alarm bells of a self-induced-­abortion trend went off late last year, when a Texas survey suggested that up to 240,000 women in that state alone had, at some point in their reproductive years, tried to end their own pregnancies. The findings don’t surprise Amy Hagstrom Miller, founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, who challenged the Texas law now before the court. (The law requires that abortion providers have hospital-admitting privileges and clinics be ambulatory surgical centers; she’ll have to close all but one of her clinics in that state if she loses the case.) “People call us and ask, ‘Can you tell me how to do my own abortion?’ ” she says. “When we tell them we can’t, they say, ‘How about if I tell you what’s in my medicine cabinet and under the sink?’ ”

And it’s not just Texas. Glamour surveyed 15 providers in more than 10 states, most of whom said they knew of women trying to self-induce abortions; five had seen patients who had attempted it. “Our hotline staff regularly hears from women who have tried and failed to terminate their own pregnancies,” says Vicki Saporta, president and CEO of the National Abortion Federation, which helps thousands of women a year obtain legal abortions. And if Google reveals what we’re really up to, consider this: Last year Americans entered at least 700,000 searches for variations of the phrase “how to self-abort,” according to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Ph.D., an economist in New York City who saw a surge in such queries when TRAP laws started getting passed in 2011. “The search data shows an unambiguous and disturbing interest in DIY abortion in parts of the U.S. today,” he says, “and it’s highest in the places where it’s most difficult to get an abortion.”

The Underground Drug Women Are Taking

The DIY methods women are using vary, experts say: Some turn to herbs and supplements to end their pregnancies, while others resort to more extreme measures, like self-injury. Many women use misoprostol, which they buy online or at flea markets and bodegas. “I saw American women purchasing it across the border in Mexico,” says filmmaker Dawn Porter, whose new abortion documentary, Trapped, will air on most PBS stations on June 20. “It’s incredibly easy to buy.” Women also get the pills through an underground network of midwives, doulas, and activists in this country. I spoke to 10 such activists, who told me that together they’ve helped at least 275 women perform abortions at home. “If I got caught for this stuff, I could be facing 25 years to life,” admitted one. “I have a seven-year-old. Going to jail is a scary thought. But I can’t just sit around and wait for things to change.”