Most major party leaders on stage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, mentioned that Vice President Kamala Harris, if elected president, would work to restore federal abortion rights.
But the most poignant comments on the subject on the first day of the DNC came from women in the South who had endured difficult pregnancies and spoke about the erosion of abortion rights since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade more than two years ago.
Kaitlyn Joshua of Louisiana, Amanda Zurawski of Texas and Hadley Duvall of Kentucky spoke at the convention Monday night. Joshua and Zurawski were denied treatment for pregnancy complications in 2022. Duvall, a 22-year-old who became pregnant as a child after being raped by her stepfather, called for exceptions to Kentucky’s abortion ban for victims of sexual assault.
Hadley Duvall, an abortion rights activist from Kentucky, leads Harris’ blitz campaign in Michigan
“I took my first pregnancy test when I was 12 years old and it was positive,” Duvall told the DNC audience. “That was the first time I was told, ‘You have options.’ I can’t imagine not having a choice, but today, because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans, that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country.”
Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, nominated three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade during his first term as president.
Joshua said she was denied miscarriage treatment when she was pregnant with her second child. “Two emergency rooms sent me away. Because of the abortion ban in Louisiana, no one would acknowledge that I had had a miscarriage,” she said.
Zurawski, who appeared alongside her husband, said her life was threatened by the delayed prenatal care. “Every time I tell our story, my heart breaks for the little girl we wanted so much, for the doctors and nurses who couldn’t help me have a safe birth, for Josh, who was afraid he would lose me too,” she said.
All three women campaigned this year in swing states such as Florida, Michigan and Wisconsin for Harris, the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, and for President Joe Biden before Biden dropped his re-election bid. Like Biden, Harris has promised to sign legislation enshrining federal abortion rights if she is elected and Congress passes such legislation.
“Our daughters deserve better. America deserves better,” Joshua said.
At a campaign event in Florida last week, she recounted how she drove herself to the emergency room in Baton Rouge after experiencing severe bleeding when she was 11 weeks pregnant, the Florida Phoenix reported. Doctors said her fetus had stopped growing but sent her home and said they would pray for her. Joshua went to another hospital when her bleeding got worse, but was told to go home again until her pregnancy was over.
“I no longer feel safe as a pregnant woman in Louisiana,” Joshua wrote in an op-ed for Louisiana Illuminator this spring. “Not as a black woman who received inadequate and delayed medical care and suffered a painful miscarriage because of my home state’s abortion ban.”
When Zurawski learned her state had passed its trigger law in June 2022 following the Women’s Health Organization’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson, she was in a hospital intensive care unit receiving treatment for septic shock, according to the Texas Tribune. Days earlier, she had learned she had suffered premature rupture of her membranes at 18 weeks pregnant. Zurawski was initially denied an abortion – her fetus had cardiac activity – until she developed sepsis.
“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric, and it didn’t have to happen,” Zurawski said in May while campaigning for Biden in Madison, Wisconsin. “It was completely preventable. It was avoidable.”
Zurawski is one of the plaintiffs who sued Texas last year, seeking clarity on what kind of medical emergency justifies an abortion under the state’s bans. The state Supreme Court dismissed the lawsuit in May, ruling that the medical exceptions in the law were broad enough, the Tribune reported.
While Joshua and Zurawski have often traveled together to swing states to tell their stories of being denied health care in the U.S. under Roe, Duvall rose to prominence after appearing in a commercial for Democratic Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s re-election campaign last year.
Duvall, who suffered a miscarriage after an assault, criticized Beshear’s opponent and former Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron for his lack of support for adding exceptions for rape and incest to the state ban, Kentucky Lantern reported. “Telling a 12-year-old girl she has to have the child of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable,” she said.
Since then, she has been an advocate for reproductive rights and campaigning for Democrats nationally. She appeared alongside Harris on MSNBC in June and was featured in a Biden ad last month.
“There are other survivors out there who have no choice,” Duvall said Monday before introducing Beshear’s speech to the DNC. “And I want you to know that we see you. We hear you.”
