Sharing stories: 11 years sober, attorney tells of abortion that gave her a second chance

Dawn Ericksen was a very different person 12 years ago than she is today. She says she was a “street-level heroin addict,” and, she told the New Jersey Independent, she learned she was pregnant in 2011 after she’d been given a urine test at a clinic where she was receiving methadone, a medication used to treat opioid addiction. 

“I knew I couldn’t keep myself safe. How the hell am I going to get any kind of prenatal care? How am I going to care for another being? And I didn’t even know how far along I was or anything. When I found out, it came as a shock,” Ericksen said. 

Ericksen, who was in her early 30s at the time, said: “Grateful to live in New Jersey, I was able to schedule with a clinic near me. I didn’t have to travel far. I was able to get quality care, follow-up care. I just celebrated 11 years clean and sober and rebuilt my life from the ground up,” she said. 

Ericksen went on to graduate from college, attend law school, and pass the bar. Today, she works with a nonprofit organization in Camden. Her clients are low-income people with behavioral health or substance abuse diagnoses, with a caseload that includes charges of domestic violence, landlord-tenant disputes, and some traffic violations and criminal charges. 

“In this kind of bonus time with the second life that I have, I’ve made it a mission to give back and to do what I can to help bring others up and help them out of their issues,” she said. 

Ericksen became politically active in abortion rights a few years before the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional protection of abortion rights nationwide. She attended her first protest in 2020, after a Supreme Court decision in a case concerning abortion access in Louisiana, and, she said, she was impressed by how organized it was, and how Capitol Police kept protesters on either side of the issue apart. In 2022, she protested outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C., against the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that struck down Roe, and found it to be a very different experience:  “The two groups were not kept separate. There was a lot of harassment from counterprotesters. We were called awful names. You could see folks going through the crowd taking pictures of us that we now know go into a facial recognition database so they know who we are, and they know who attends what.” 

She said in some ways it was because of the harassment she experienced that day that she decided to tell her personal abortion story, even though it can feel dangerous at times to use her real name. 

“I feel, with personalized stories, it does make an impact, that you can see an issue one way, but then you hear a real person talk about how and why they made these decisions, and think, OK, well, maybe that can shift opinion and that can humanize and that can give depth and nuance to a situation that somebody might have thought was initially very black-and-white, and very little in this life is black-and-white,” Ericksen said.

Ericksen said  it is important for New Jersey voters to understand that rights they now take for granted are not necessarily safe.

“Things we thought were rights, that were settled law, are being overturned all the time. As a legal professional, I think the average person may not really understand this death by a thousand cuts that we’re seeing in the legal profession that is just horrifying,” Ericksen said. “Because it doesn’t necessarily take broad grand gestures of, Abortion is illegal, and you can’t do that. It’s appointing certain judges. It’s stopping funding to programs that would help people, you know, Planned Parenthood, things like that, or even just cuts to Medicaid. These little things, or incremental tightening of the noose, is what I fear more, honestly, because the grand gestures, even though we know that they happen now — but the tightening of the noose, it doesn’t ever seem to untighten.”