On April 7th, Lizelle Herrera, 26, found herself behind bars. She was arrested by the Starr County Sheriff’s Office, charged with murder, and held on $500,000 bond. Her crime: a self-induced abortion. By Saturday, Lizelle had been released, however, as the District Attorney announced that the law had overstepped its authority. Why? Because though the Texas murder statute does apply to abortion cases, it exempts pregnant women who self-induce. This, and this only, has freed Lizelle.

Abortion rights won in the 1973 landmark Roe vs Wade case continue to crumble around the country. Lizelle’s arrest is a consequence of Texas SB 8 (says Melissa Arjona, who co-founded South Texans for Reproductive Justice), which criminalized 6 week abortion and deputized private citizens to seek out and sue those who participate. Where once women were able to make choices — albeit with limits, and often with plenty of attacks from others — they have become bounties to conservatives. In a further chilling detail, Lizelle was turned over to authorities by the hospital.

The story of Lizelle’s arrest and subsequent release might be commanding headlines this week, but she isn’t the first woman to face such charges. And she won’t be the last. In 2012, an Idaho woman was arrested for a self-induced abortion; in 2015, a Georgia woman was charged with murder after she gave birth on her way to the hospital after taking abortifacients. Some have even been arrested and convicted for miscarriages suspected by physicians to be abortions (despite what the woman herself says). Does it sound dystopian? It should; it’s the stuff of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale — and yet it has become very real indeed. We even have a window into that future: El Salvador.

Manuela’s story came to light in 2008; a mother of two, pregnant, and very ill, she was carried to the hospital by her relatives. She had begun to hemorrhage, lost the fetus, and also consciousness, by the time they arrived — but instead of helping Manuela, the doctor turned her over to authorities, who decided it was an abortion. They put her in prison to serve a 30 years sentence; she died in 2010. More than 140 women have been charged under El Salvador’s ban on abortion since 1998. Some (like Manuela) claim they miscarried rather than having an abortion, but whether the loss of a fetus was intended or not, the law is very clear: a woman’s life is of no value. El Salvador has also let innumerable women die during pregnancies because they also outlawed any termination of a fetus, even if both woman is in danger of death.

El Salvador is a small country in Central American struggling with gang violence and high homicide rates as well as the fallout from civil war. Its struggles may seem worlds away from those in the U.S., but we have our own stories like it.

Keysheonna Reed lived in Arkansas, in a small house with nine other people. She woke one night with terrible pains, and gave birth to two stillborn babies. Unsure what to do, she placed them in a suitcase as a coffin, and left it on the side of a county road. In the ensuing investigation, Kesheonna would be charged with “abuse of a corpse” — a law frequently used by courts to punish pregnancy loss. It was used against a New York woman who went to the hospital following spontaneous miscarriage; she was charged for putting the body in a garbage bag. But other life choices may be used as evidence against a woman as well: Brittney Poolaw presently faces a four-year sentence after her miscarriage because she used marijuana and methamphetamines while pregnant. In New York in 2008, a woman was charged with manslaughter for her own miscarriage after a car accident because she was not wearing a seatbelt.

I do not list these latter cases to privilege miscarriage over abortion — far from it. Rather, I do so to make a terrifying point. The laws against abortion are, in fact, laws against women. Anti-abortion advocates say that a fetus is more valuable than a woman, and simultaneously suggest that a woman’s value resides only in her ability to carry a fetus to term. There is no point in splitting hairs about which terminations are which, because in the eyes of anti-abortion law, the woman is considered as guilty either way. A woman has no right to her body, no right to how it is used or perceived. She may be impregnated against her will, forced to carry against her will, incarcerated against her will. We must fight the stripping away of our rights, beginning with the right to an abortion.

Lizelle Herrera’s case has been called a harbinger of things to come if Roe vs Wade is overturned. That will probably happen as early as June 2022. As reported by Vox, twenty-two states already have laws on the books that ban abortion. The fact that charges have been dismissed against Lizelle should not encourage us to let down our guard. We are living through a new conservative war against the rights of women (and also LGBTQ); it will not end here. It won’t end with the probable upset of Roe vs. Wade. In fact, it won’t end. As with so many attacks on our rights, we must stand up now, and do it together, or watch decades of progress slip away.