The New Faces of Abortion Rights
Democrats used to talk about abortion in abstract terms. Now Harris campaign volunteers are getting specific and changing the debate.
By: Peter Slevin, originally published August 9, 2024, The New Yorker
The crowd that greeted Kamala Harris in a high-school gym outside Milwaukee last month was delighted to the point of delirium. People roared when she said that, as a former prosecutor, she knows “Donald Trump’s type.” They cheered again when she spoke up for affordable child care and an assault-weapons ban. But when she said, “We trust women to make decisions about their own body,” the response was so loud that it nearly drowned out the end of the sentence. She shouted above the din, “And not have their government tell them what to do.”
Before Harris spoke, Ben Wikler, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, noted that she has been talking up abortion rights since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, two years ago. In January, on the fifty-first anniversary of the Roe decision, she had opened a national reproductive-rights tour just fifteen miles away, in traditionally Republican territory, where Democrats are counting on opposition to Dobbs to help them in November. Rebecca Hammer, a financial planner from Oconomowoc, emerged into the sunlight after the rally, thrilled to see Harris as the party’s new standard-bearer. She was aware that President Joe Biden, a practicing Catholic, is a reluctant Roe supporter, who said as recently as last year, “I’m not big on abortion.” Harris is a different story. “It is personal to her,” Hammer said. “She can feel it in her bones.”
Few issues are more important to Harris’s chances in November than reproductive rights, which also include in-vitro fertilization and contraception. Since Dobbs, pro-choice advocates have scored victories on ballot initiatives in states such as Kansas, Michigan, Kentucky, and Ohio, signaling the strength of the Democrats’ case. In Wisconsin, where four of the past six Presidential races have been decided by less than one percentage point, polls show that abortion is the top issue for Democrats. “There is not a piece of the coalition who we feel is not mobilized by this issue,” Morgan Mohr, the director of the Harris campaign’s reproductive-rights strategy, told me.
Mohr recalled the moment when she realized that the campaign was onto something. Earlier this year, she monitored a focus group of voters as they watched a new ad featuring Austin Dennard, a Texas ob-gyn who was denied an abortion even though her fetus had no chance of survival. “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” Dennard said, looking directly at the camera. “I was to continue my pregnancy, putting my life at risk. It’s every woman’s worst nightmare, and it was absolutely unbearable.” Members of the focus group put their hands to their heads or held them to their hearts. Dennard’s story, Mohr saw, was harrowing, and potentially galvanizing.
To make that emotional connection with voters, Mohr has helped more than a dozen women to talk about their abortions on the campaign trail. The women, called abortion storytellers, have introduced Harris at events, and they are training others to give their own testimonies in the hope of highlighting the stakes in November. Those sharing their experiences include the actor Ashley Judd, who travelled to Virginia to speak about being raped and getting an abortion. Hadley Duvall, whose raw account of being raped by her stepfather at the age of twelve moved Kentucky voters in 2023, stopped in Madison and La Crosse in late July. Two women, one from Louisiana and one from Texas, did twenty-eight events in seventeen cities in six states last spring. Unlike feminist groups that for decades have told abortion stories while emphasizing female empowerment, and politicians who have relied on elliptical talk of “choice,” these women often speak about the agony of needing to terminate a pregnancy for medical reasons and, because of Dobbs, struggling to find help. At a rally in Madison in June to mark the anniversary of Dobbs, Senator Elizabeth Warren told me that such stories are powerful because, by moving beyond euphemism, they “break the mold.”
“The conventional wisdom was you don’t talk about abortion on TV,” Tanya Bjork, a Harris campaign adviser and a longtime Democratic strategist in Wisconsin, told me. “That is completely different already this year. We talk about abortion all over the place.” Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who was denied an abortion until she became gravely ill, told me backstage after the rally in Madison, “I don’t think two years ago I would have been talking about my uterus on national television—and now my permanently closed fallopian tube is just a fact.” She became a plaintiff in a Texas lawsuit and recorded a sixty-second ad, “Willow’s Box,” about her ordeal, which has been viewed nearly six million times on YouTube. She has since quit her job and appeared at campaign roundtables and rallies around the country, where she tells her story over and over. “You realize that, even though this is hard, you’re reaching new people every time,” she said. “If I can hit one new person’s ears each time, I’ll keep doing it.”
Anna Igler is, like Dennard, an abortion storyteller who has been both a doctor and a patient. An ob-gyn in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, who has regularly overseen births and performed abortions, she ended a pregnancy of her own at twenty-five weeks, in 2020, after her fetus was diagnosed with a devastating brain abnormality. Unable to be treated in Wisconsin after twenty-one weeks, she travelled to Colorado for the procedure. On the morning of June 24, 2022, Igler was at work in her office when she received a text from a friend. “Anna, I’m so sorry,” it read. Igler was perplexed. She had not been following the news that day and was not expecting the Dobbs ruling. “Then I got the gist of the message, and I was, like, Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me, it really happened.” Wisconsin would now enforce an 1849 law that made it illegal to perform an abortion except to save the life of a mother. (The law has since been overturned by a circuit-court judge.)
Igler had rarely discussed her abortion, but she reached out to a Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter, who told her story. Soon, she was taping an advertisement for Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat in a tough re-election race. (He won.) The following year, she did an ad for a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate (who also won), and she is now featured in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for American Bridge, a Democratic political-action committee. In the ad, she says, with red eyes, that she ended a wanted pregnancy “because my baby was very sick.” She has spoken at press conferences and rallies, and she told me that, for a few days after each event, she cries a lot. “And then I just do it all over again when someone asks,” she said. “Because I have to. This is too important not to talk about.”
I met Igler on a Saturday morning at the headquarters of the Brown County Democratic Party, where she had agreed to speak to a dozen volunteers ahead of a door-knocking session. Before she was introduced, she stood to the side, and I asked what she was thinking. She answered that she had got into the right frame of mind by listening to the raucous song “Know Your Enemy,” by Rage Against the Machine. (Lyrics: “I’ve got no patience now / So sick of complacence now.”) As she headed toward the lectern, she whispered, “I do know my enemy.”
Igler told the group the story of her pregnancy. “Her name is Nora Rose,” she began, “and she should be almost three and a half years old right now.” She said that she fears another ban on abortion in Wisconsin if Republicans win local elections, and a national ban if Trump wins. “Politicians like Trump do not have the expertise, knowledge, or understanding to make any of these medical decisions,” she said. “Why is our country headed back to the nineteen-fifties?” She ended with a firm warning: “Republicans have no idea the powerful rage they have unleashed in us. We are coming for those who seek to control and oppress us.”
In past years, such an event might have focused on tax policy or school funding. Instead, for twenty-five minutes, Igler went on to answer questions about intimate details of pregnancy and abortion, including in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that she has used successfully since her abortion. One woman talked about period trackers. A man explained that his sister in Texas had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and asked whether that termination would be called an abortion. (There is widespread confusion about this, and, as a result, some doctors have delayed lifesaving care.) Later, Igler said that people often approach her after rallies to tell her their stories: “I consider it the start of another MeToo movement, with women coming out and saying publicly, ‘I had an abortion.’ ”
Even for some pro-choice women, this means talking about lingering shame and regret. As the volunteers rose to collect their door-knocking literature, Barbara Dorff, a former Green Bay city-council member who had been listening thoughtfully from the second row, said that the word “abortion” saddens her. Now sixty-nine, she explained that she had lost a pregnancy in 1982. “You think you’re safe after twelve weeks, right?” she said. “And then one day I just started bleeding.” Her fetus had died. A doctor performed a dilation and curettage to clean her womb. When the nurse referred to the procedure as an abortion, Dorff was devastated. To her, the word suggested that she had made a choice to abort her child, and that she had done something wrong. “It’s a hard word, it’s a harsh word,” she said. “There is a feeling or a weight behind that word.”
That afternoon, I trailed Christy Welch, the chair of the Brown County Democratic Party, as she met voters in the Green Bay suburb of Allouez. Linda Wallenfang, a sixty-four-year-old former union member at Georgia-Pacific, who is now retired, invited Welch into her living room and took a seat on the couch. When the topic turned to abortion, Wallenfang said that she has qualms about the issue but believes it’s none of the government’s business. She volunteered a story about the shame her late mother felt after having two abortions in the fifties, the first when she was a teen-ager and the second when she already had two young children and was feeling overwhelmed. “My mom went to her grave thinking she was a murderer. We told her God forgave her,” Wallenfang said. When people hear stories about “what happens to real women,” she added, “it changes your perspective.”
To say that abortion politics in Wisconsin have intensified since Dobbs is to understate the case. The return of the 1849 law, which remained in place for more than a year, activated many voters who had taken abortion access for granted. This was most evident in the 2023 contest for control of the state Supreme Court. The race became, by a factor of four, the most expensive judicial election in U.S. history. Though the race was officially nonpartisan, the winner, Janet Protasiewicz, ran on a platform of preserving abortion rights and reforming the state’s gerrymandered voting maps. She won by eleven points, giving pro-choice forces a majority on the court for the first time in years. Several times this year, Harris has been to Wisconsin and spoken about abortion, including a visit to La Crosse, on the Mississippi River. “Ten years ago,” Bjork, the Democratic strategist, said, “you would not send anybody to La Crosse just to talk about abortion.”
To skeptics who say that the economy and other issues outrank abortion in importance, Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic Party leader, says that surveys paint an incomplete picture. When asked what is on their minds, voters will often name inflation or the economy, he said, but “if you engage in a conversation with a voter and you say, ‘Would you ever vote for someone who thinks that politicians should be able to override your own medical decisions when it comes to abortion?’ they will answer, ‘Absolutely not.’ ” Such framing is designed to resonate with Republicans and independents who resent government intrusion in their personal affairs. “It’s about freedom,” Jaime Harrison, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told me during his visit to the Wisconsin Democrats’ annual convention. “It’s about good people in this country who believe that women should have the right to control their own bodies.”
The “freedom” formulation proved particularly effective in the first post-Dobbs electoral test for abortion rights, in Kansas. In August, 2022, a coalition called Kansans for Constitutional Freedom helped defeat an effort to remove abortion protections from the state constitution. Harris has now made freedom a central theme of her campaign, seizing a word that Republican politicians since Ronald Reagan have tried to claim for themselves. On August 7th, addressing a large crowd in Eau Claire alongside her new running mate, Tim Walz, she spoke of “the sacred freedom to vote,” the freedom to join a union, and “the freedom to live safe from gun violence.” Her voice rising to a shout, she reminded the crowd of an ongoing assault on “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
Harris often speaks in optimistic terms, of “freedom to.” It is then up to the storytellers to show voters what an absence of reproductive freedom means. Zurawski, who filmed the “Willow’s Box” ad, recalled that, when the campaign asked if she would like to help, she didn’t hesitate. “I’m terrified of the alternative, as I think all Americans should be,” she said. “I couldn’t sit back and not fight back. There are a lot of folks who can’t tell their stories, or they don’t want to publicly, and I can. I had one woman tell me that she had had an abortion and literally no one in her life knows.”
At the Madison rally with Warren, Zurawski told the story, again, of her delayed abortion, to supportive cheers from the crowd. She said how hard it was to film the campaign ad and talked about why she was there. If it could help protect other women, she asked, “how could I not go to my most vulnerable place?”
Peter Slevin is a contributing writer to The New Yorker, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.