Women sharing personal stories about abortion bans have become a political force

If the US Supreme Court had not overturned Roe v. Wade, Nancy Davis and Kaitlyn Joshua might never have met, or become public figures.

But within weeks of the ban taking effect in 2022, both women were denied abortion care in their home state of Louisiana.

Ever since, they have been talking about their frightening and fraught experiences, joining a new wave of women willing to publicly share their medical experiences, and wielding a new kind of political power.

Dozens of women have been speaking out loud what many previously had kept private. As part of the fight for abortion rights, many of them have been campaigning across the country for politicians — especially Vice President Kamala Harris — and participating in media interviews, political rallies, protests and lawsuits.

It’s an open question, but some believe their stories and the reproductive rights issue could change election outcomes — both at the federal level, and in states, including those considering ballot initiatives on abortion rights.

How Davis and Joshua went public

In the summer of 2022, Nancy Davis, already a mother of two girls, was expecting her third child. In late July, when she was 10 weeks pregnant, her doctors in Baton Rouge told her the fetus was developing without a skull. It’s called acrania, and is always fatal for the fetus.

But Louisiana had banned nearly all abortions on Aug. 1, and after that, Davis’s doctors refused to terminate her pregnancy.

Davis was devastated, and then she took a dramatic next step, one that has become increasingly common since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe in the Dobbs case. She went public.

Davis emailed a local TV station in Baton Rouge, and started giving interviews to other local, and then national, news outlets.

Davis soon hired a civil rights lawyer and held a press conference on the steps of the Louisiana capitol, calling on state lawmakers to change the law. Her goal was to save other women from hearing the message the doctors had given her: “Basically they said I had to carry my baby, to bury my baby,” Davis said.

Even with all this publicity, it took Davis several weeks to gather enough money to travel to New York to end her pregnancy. Through it all, she continued to speak out, even appearing on the Dr. Phil show.

“I knew if I was going through it, other people was going through it as well,” Davis told NPR.

A frightening miscarriage at home

While Davis was talking to the media, another Baton Rouge woman, Kaitlyn Joshua, was beginning her own slow-motion collision with the new state law. It was early September 2022, and Joshua was 11 weeks pregnant with her second child. She was busy getting ready for her daughter’s fourth birthday, when she started miscarrying.

She was in excruciating pain, and bleeding so much that her husband feared for her life.

Over the course of two days, Joshua went to two different emergency rooms seeking abortion care to empty her uterus and complete the miscarriage. This would lessen the bleeding and pain.

But Louisiana’s abortion ban had only been in effect for six weeks, so doctors refused to perform a D&C procedure or prescribe medications for the miscarriage. Joshua ended up miscarrying at home, with only her family’s support, in pain and frightened for her health.

Joshua remembered seeing Davis telling her story in the news. She was inspired to go public as well. She spoke at a state health department hearing on Louisiana’s abortion ban, and later told her story to NPR and then to other prominent outlets.

Joshua and Davis met at an abortion rights rally in 2023 and became friends.

They lean on each other for support, especially when testifying against anti-abortion laws in Louisiana’s legislature capitol, which is 76% male, majority white, and comprised of a supermajority of anti-abortion Republicans.

Hitting the campaign trail with Democrats

Both Davis and Joshua began traveling with President Biden’s re-election campaign, and later switched to campaigning with Vice President Kamala Harris. Both women attended the 2023 State of the Union address.

Joshua appeared in a television campaign ad for Biden. She was also one of several women who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in August, sharing traumatic stories about how the Dobbs decision had harmed their pregnancy care.

“No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have,” Joshua told the convention crowd and millions of voters watching from home. “They write to me, saying, ‘What happened to you, happened to me.’”

The convention also featured two Texas women who sued their state after being denied abortions — Kate Cox, denied care after receiving a fatal fetal diagnosis, and Amanda Zurawski, who became septic after doctors refused to provide miscarriage care.

Another speaker was Anya Cook, a Florida patient who lost half her blood volume after she was denied abortion care and began miscarrying in a bathroom.

There have been many more patients with similar stories going public over the last two years. And those stories have helped shape the election in new ways.

How abortion storytellers could change voters' minds

On November 5, voters in 10 states will decide whether to add abortion rights to their state constitutions.

Depending on the outcomes, areas of the South and Midwest could experience dramatic reversals after two years of extremely rigid bans on abortion.

Vice President Harris is counting on support for abortion rights to help lead her to victory, and has promised to sign any federal bill that Congress might pass restoring abortions.

Republicans, sensing the political headwinds, have toned down aggressive anti-abortion messaging.

Former President Donald Trump has sent mixed messages, boasting about appointing the three Supreme Court Justices who helped overturn Roe, while also claiming his second term would be “great for women and their reproductive rights.”

Can personal stories sway voters?

Preliminary political research indicates that women like Davis and Joshua, telling their own personal stories, are reaching voters.

These stories have proliferated. A study from the University of California at San Francisco of major newspaper coverage found that just one year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe, 20% of stories about abortion included a patient’s personal experience — up from just 4% as recently as 2018.

These stories often feature women with wanted pregnancies who were denied medical care, said one of the study authors, Katie Woodruff.

“Certainly the general public did not expect an abortion ban to be affecting basic maternal health,” she said.

One poll found women voters rank abortion as their number two priority this election cycle, just a few points behind the economy.

Over three-quarters of women want abortion legal in all or most cases, another survey found. Even in swing states, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans told pollsters they support abortion rights.

Harvard professor Robert Blendon cautioned that voters often say they support certain policies, but that support hasn’t always dictated who they end up voting for.

But this year, there are some signals that the new cadre of abortion storytellers could be turning surging support for abortion rights into actual votes.

Tresa Undem, a pollster with PerryUndem, said her surveys show that voters who have heard stories like Davis and Joshua’s, when compared to those who haven't, are more likely to say the state of abortion rights will affect who they cast their ballot for in 2024.

The shift was particularly striking among independents who favor abortion rights: 73% who heard those stories said the abortion issue will affect which candidate they vote for.

But for those who hadn’t heard such stories, only 21% said the abortion issue would affect who they vote for.

Undem added that despite the rising media coverage, Republicans are less likely to have heard the stories of women denied care.

How advocates for ballot measures are using the stories

Advocates in Florida, one of the 10 states with an abortion rights measure on the November ballot, have made these stories central to their advertising and messaging.

The campaign is featuring the stories of women such as Cook and Shanae Smith-Cunningham, two Floridians who were each denied care after their waters broke early in pregnancy. Canvassers for the “Yes on 4” campaign bring them up every time they knock on a voter’s door.

“Our hope is that those stories are so impactful that they remember when they are in the ballot booth,” said Natasha Sutherland, the communications director for the "Yes on 4" campaign.

Organizers who recently won abortion rights ballot measures in Ohio and Michigan told NPR that personal stories were key to getting out the vote.

“That's what actually drives it home for people and makes them realize, ‘Wow, I need to get to the polls to do this, because there's somebody out there in my town, in my community, maybe in my family, that's counting on me to take this action,’” said Gabriel Mann, who worked as the communications director for Ohioans for Reproductive Rights, the group that passed Issue 1 establishing abortion rights in 2023.

Nicole Wells Stallworth, one of the leaders of Michigan’s Proposal 3 in 2022, said the campaign leaned into abortion stories after internal polling showed just how effective it was.

She said ads featuring women’s personal stories increased support for the proposal by an average of 5.7%. With moderate voters the shift was even greater: 6.9%.

The risks and rewards for abortion storytellers

All that data underline what Davis and Joshua say they have experienced routinely after telling their stories: people change their minds.

Joshua has spoken to Black conservative Christians about her story, and then heard them preach from the pulpit about the need for abortion care, she said. Davis’s own mother, who used to oppose abortion rights, now supports them, Davis said.

“People even say ‘You know, I've crossed over.’ Or, like, ‘Now I'm pro-choice, or, like, you made me change my way of thinking,” Davis said.

Speaking out can attract strong political blowback and online harassment.

After Joshua spoke at the Democratic National Convention, Louisina’s Attorney General posted on X that “Democrats have their facts wrong.”

Davis has found anti-abortion groups commenting on her story and suggesting that her fetus could have somehow lived without a skull.

Both women went on to have healthy pregnancies after their medical experiences being denied abortions.

Joshua now has a one-year-old son. Davis’s daughter, her third, was born in the spring.

Both continue to travel for the Harris campaign, children in tow, while juggling their jobs and other commitments.

Joshua was recently named one of the Women of the Year by Glamour magazine.

One question Joshua keeps encountering is why she doesn’t just leave Louisiana.

“And I'm like ‘No. I am a Black woman in Louisiana. My people built the state. We're gonna stay and fight for the state that we love,’” Joshua said.

“And I just think that says so much more.”

This story comes from NPR’s health reporting partnership with WWNO and KFF Health News.