Most major party leaders who spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, said Vice President Kamala Harris would work to restore federal abortion rights if elected president.
But the most moving remarks on the subject on the first day of the DNC came from Southern women who had traumatic 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 from Louisiana, Amanda Zurawski from Texas and Hadley Duvall Kentucky spoke at the convention Monday night. Joshua and Zurawski were stripped of custody due to 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.
“I took my first pregnancy test at 12, and it was positive,” Duvall told the DNC crowd. “That was the first time I was told, ‘You have options.’ I can’t imagine not having options, but today that’s the reality for so many women and girls across the country because of Donald Trump’s abortion ban.”
Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, nominated three Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade during his first presidential term.
Joshua spoke about being denied treatment for a miscarriage while pregnant with her second child. “Two emergency rooms turned me away. Because of Louisiana’s abortion ban, no one would acknowledge that I had a miscarriage,” she said.
Appearing alongside her husband, Zurawski said delayed care for her pregnancy threatened her life. “Every time I tell our story, my heart breaks for the baby girl we so desperately wanted, for the doctors and nurses who couldn’t help me give birth safely, for Josh who was afraid he would lose me, too,” she said.
All three women campaigned in key battleground states such as Florida, Michigan AND Wisconsin this year for Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, and President Joe Biden before he suspended his reelection bid. Like Biden, Harris has pledged to sign legislation codifying federal abortion rights if elected and if Congress passes such a bill.
“Our daughters deserve better. America deserves better,” Joshua said.
During a campaign visit to Florida last week, she told the story of how, when she was 11 weeks pregnant, she drove herself to the emergency room in Baton Rouge after experiencing bulky bleeding, Florida Phoenix reported. Doctors said her fetus had stopped growing, but they sent her home and said they would pray for her. Joshua went to another hospital when the bleeding became more severe, but she was told to go home again until the pregnancy passed.
“I no longer feel safe being pregnant in Louisiana,” Joshua wrote in an article for Louisiana Porthole this spring. “Not as a black woman who received inadequate and delayed medical care, enduring a painful miscarriage because of the abortion ban in my home state.”
When Zurawski learned her state had passed a trigger law following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022, she was Intensive care unit hospital where she was being treated for septic shock, according to the Texas Tribune. She had learned days earlier that she had premature rupture of membranes at 18 weeks pregnant. Zurawski was initially denied an abortion — her fetus had a heartbeat — until she developed sepsis.
“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric and it didn’t have to happen,” Zurawski said. he said in May during Biden’s campaign in Madison, Wisconsin. “It was completely avoidable. It was preventable.”
Zurawski is one of the plaintiffs who sued Texas last year, seeking clarification on what type of medical emergency justifies an abortion under the state’s bans. The state Supreme Court dismissed the challenge in May, ruling that the law’s medical exceptions were broad enough, Tribune reported.
While Joshua and Zurawski often traveled together to swing states to share their stories of denial of care in the United States after the Roe ruling, Duvall rose to prominence after appearing in a re-election campaign ad for Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear last year.
Duvall, who suffered a miscarriage as a result of the assault, criticized Beshear’s opponent and former Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron for not supporting adding rape and incest exemptions to the state’s ban, Kentucky Lighthouse reported. “To tell a 12-year-old girl that she has to have a child from her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable,” she said.
She has since become an advocate for reproductive rights and has hit the campaign trail for Democrats nationally, in June, he will appear alongside Harris on MSNBC and in Biden’s ad last month.
“There are other survivors who have no choice,” Duvall said Monday before introducing Beshear’s speech at the DNC. “And I want you to know that we see you. We hear you.”
