On June 24, 2022 in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a conservative supermajority of the US Supreme Court overturned the court’s rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), disregarding 49 years of US legal precedent recognizing abortion as a medical procedure protected from “interference by the State” under a Constitutional right to privacy. The legal implications of this ruling, and the cultural and political responses it provokes, will continue to unfold for years, even generations, to come: as Laura Briggs (2017) instructs, all politics have become reproductive politics. At this critical moment of upheaval, anthropologists have much to say about how the United States got here, where it may be headed, and how the US case looks and resonates elsewhere in the world. Joining theory with comparative insights from both longitudinal and recent fieldwork, contributors to this Hot Spots series demonstrate the centrality of abortion to the anthropological project of understanding human lives and experiences.