The difficulties of procreation are less taboo than before in American politics

Photo: Robyn Beck Agence France-Presse A person wears a pro-abortion pin during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago on August 19, 2024.

Dylan Wells – The Washington Post and Hannah Knowles – The Washington Post

Posted at 7:52 PM

• United States

Lucia Báez-Geller was “over the moon” when she learned about two years ago that she was pregnant with her second child. After having her first child at age 39, she began trying to get pregnant as soon as she got the green light from her doctors.

“I really thought everything was going to be OK because my first pregnancy had gone so well,” she says. But a few weeks into her second pregnancy, doctors told her that her pregnancy was not progressing normally and that the embryo was not viable. Her doctors presented her with three options: a dilation and curettage — a brief surgical procedure to dilate the cervix and remove tissue from the uterus; an abortion pill, which doctors described as being extremely painful; and waiting for a natural miscarriage, which could be risky.

Báez-Geller, who lives in Miami, opted for a curettage, which was performed at 12 weeks of pregnancy. A year later, she fears she will be denied the same procedure under Florida's six-week abortion ban, despite the law's exception for fatal fetal abnormalities — which some women say they struggled to negotiate.

If she had been denied the procedure in Florida, Báez-Geller said through tears, she and her family likely would have had to travel nearly 800 miles to Virginia, the closest state she believes she could have had the procedure, noting the added strain it would have put on her and her family. “It would have been devastating.”

Báez-Geller, 41, channeled her anger over the law change into her campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in a district near Miami. Before last Tuesday's primaries, which she won, she said she wanted to “humanize the issue” of abortion, drawing on her personal story and mentioning her unhappy pregnancy during her campaign when she spoke about reproductive rights.

A game-changing judgment

At every political level, women running for office this year are opening up to discuss their own reproductive histories, recounting their experiences with in vitro fertilization (IVF), miscarriage, and abortion—topics that for years were considered inappropriate at best and potentially damaging at worst on the campaign trail. But after the Supreme Court struck down abortion protections two years ago, that calculus—“Can I talk about these deeply personal issues and still win an election?”—has changed.

Democrats are particularly hoping that speaking from personal experience will help candidates connect with voters. Abortion access has proven to be one of the most mobilizing issues for Democratic voters in recent years. Democrats are highlighting their victories in “red” states, such as Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection in Kentucky and a House victory in Alabama, where the Democrat has placed a strong emphasis on reproductive health care.

Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports pro-abortion Democratic women, said it was “especially imperative” for candidates to open up about their experiences with reproductive health because of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which struck down federal abortion rights.

“Women who speak out about their own stories show that they have a deep understanding of these issues and they bring authenticity to the conversation,” Mackler says. “Voters understand that these are people who are going to stand up and fight for them because they know what it’s like to live in this post-Dobbs reality.”

After the Dobbs decision, other lower court decisions and legislative action sparked even more frank conversations among candidates.

For Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat who represents part of Las Vegas, the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that frozen embryos used in IVF treatments are human beings was instrumental in her decision to share her personal experience. After getting the green light from her family, Lee spoke on the campaign trail about her own struggles with getting pregnant, including multiple miscarriages and IVF.

“I think as women in leadership, we always say that representation matters. And, yes, it matters when you have lived experience and you can speak from experience,” she says. “Making sure that women have a full range of options is really important to me because I’ve been through multiple miscarriages, so it’s very personal, and it’s an issue where there’s a lot of gray areas.” »

For the sake of those who are experiencing the same thing

The Alabama decision also influenced Caitlin Draper, a Democrat running for Congress in Arkansas, who fast-tracked her own IVF procedure because she feared the ruling would foreshadow similar changes in her state.

“Honestly, we were scared and said, ‘Well, let’s do it,’” Draper said of the conversations she had with her husband. She became pregnant, but soon learned the pregnancy was not viable and became concerned about how Arkansas’s near-total ban on abortion might affect her medical options in the state.

She said she felt compelled to share her experience out of anger and concern for women who could not travel out of state, if needed, as she had been able to.

“Recounting personal health details or personal family struggles [in the past] would not have been something that counselors would have told women to do. They probably would have told women to keep those things private,” says Amanda Hunter, executive director of the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, adding that her organization has watched the trend grow over the past decade, particularly since the #MeToo movement.

But the overturning of Roe v. Wade marked a significant milestone, Hunter says: “The Dobbs decision was a turning point for women to share their reproductive health journeys.”

“When some women feel comfortable telling their stories, it shows other women that it's okay to do so, and it encourages them to do the same,” she adds. her.

Men talk too

The trend has also spread to Republican men and candidates. Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota and new Democratic vice-presidential candidate, has spoken publicly about the difficulties he and his wife experienced in conceiving children. He has recounted this experience at campaign rallies since joining the ticket and at closed-door fundraisers with Democratic donors.

“This is a personal thing for me and my family. When my wife and I decided to have children, we went through years of fertility treatments. I remember praying every night for good news, feeling the knots in my stomach when the phone rang, and the pain when we found out the treatments hadn’t worked,” Walz said during his first appearance with current Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democratic presidential hopeful, in Philadelphia earlier this month. “So it’s no coincidence that when we welcomed our daughter, we named her Hope.”

During her Republican presidential primary campaign, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley regularly mentioned her struggles to have children, while explaining her position on abortion. After the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling on IVF, she discussed the fact that she conceived her son through artificial insemination.

“I struggled to have both of my children. Both of my children—we were blessed—were the result of fertility treatments. We need to make sure that every state in this country allows parents to have access to IVF,” Haley said at a rally in February.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also spoke during the presidential primaries about his wife, Casey,'s miscarriage and its impact on his family, and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy said his wife, Apoorva, also suffered a miscarriage. Sam Brown, a Republican Senate candidate from Nevada, sat next to his wife in an interview earlier this year in which she described having an abortion before they met, and Congresswoman Michelle Steel said earlier this year that she did not support federal restrictions on in vitro fertilization because the treatment allowed her to start a family.

From Mother to Daughter

Nevertheless, the effort to speak more openly about reproductive health is arguably more pronounced among Democratic candidates.

Maggie Goodlander, a 37-year-old congressional candidate from New Hampshire, decided to tell the story of her stillbirth in the first video she released to announce her pregnancy. campaign in the 2nd district of the state.

When she was 19 weeks along, tests showed her fetus was in critical condition. She and her husband, Jake Sullivan, a national security adviser in the Biden administration, were referred to a maternal-fetal medicine doctor, but they had trouble getting an appointment. Goodlander said she was also concerned about complications because of her age and pre-existing conditions, including rheumatoid arthritis and alopecia areata.

When Goodlander finally got an appointment, she learned her amniotic fluid level was low and had to undergo an MRI. She was eventually diagnosed with placenta previa, a pregnancy in which the placenta partially or completely covers the cervix, creating another set of complications.

The fetus died in her womb and she had to undergo a surgical evacuation, or dilation and evacuation, that lasted two days.

“The first day they put rods into the cervix, that's the dilation phase, and the next day they evacuate — the language is so horrible,” Goodlander said in an interview with the Washington Post. But the procedure came too late, Goodlander says, and after the first stage she delivered her stillborn baby herself in a hotel bathroom near Boston Hospital.

“It's the most heartbreaking and traumatic experience you can go through,” Goodlander says.

“The idea that anyone other than the patient, the family or the provider could be involved is just unimaginable to me. And what we’re seeing is extremist politicians and judges coming between patients and providers, causing chaos, taking away rights and putting lives at risk,” she says. That experience “really shaped the energy that I’m going to put into addressing all sides” of the issue, she says.

Goodlander’s campaign launch video, which also features her mother, who ran for Congress when she was a child, underscores how times have changed for women candidates and their ability to tell their personal stories as candidates.

“When my mother ran for office, her opponent’s slogan was, ‘A woman’s place is in the home, not in the House.’ And one of the biggest criticisms of her was that I, a two-year-old, was at home,” Goodlander says. “I’m so grateful for all the women who came before us, who paved the way and really flipped the script.”