The brutal US abortion ruling is a potential death sentence for all pregnant women | Emma Brockes

Doctors in many states are now barred from intervening unless they're sure someone is about to die. Inevitably, some will

To mitigate the shock, perhaps, or because people believed it, one thing said in the immediate wake of the overturning of Roe v Wade was that for much of the US, not a great deal would change. Symbolically, of course, it was horrific, potentially prefiguring a larger swing by the supreme court against civil rights. Practically, however, abortion limits across large swaths of the country were already so severe, and the availability of clinics so reduced, that it raised the question of how much difference would this make anyway.

In the two weeks since the justices made their decision, the answer to that question has been rising to the surface. Doctor by doctor, activist by activist, the implications of a total abortion ban in the eight states in which it was instantly triggered, and the further nine expected to follow suit within weeks, have begun to be outlined. The threat posed to women's health is so staggering, so nonsensical, as to seem barely possible.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist