The 2024 election put unprecedented focus on the experiences of people who sought abortions. They won't stop telling their stories with Trump in office.
By Shefali Luthra, for The 19th
Lauren Miller already had a bad feeling about how things would turn out.
She couldn’t stop the nervous tears, whether she was watching Instagram videos with her toddler or sitting in on work calls. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t stop imagining what might happen later that evening—that, for all her efforts to spotlight abortion, for all the times she’d shared her own story, it still somehow wouldn’t be enough—that Election Day would end in heartbreak.
Miller, who lives in the Dallas area, had thrown herself into showing why the presidential election was tied to the future of abortion rights. She testified in front of Congress about the overturn of Roe v. Wade, appeared on national television, and traveled to Maine to speak at a campaign event on behalf of Vice President Kamala Harris. In Texas, she campaigned for U.S. Rep. Colin Allred, a Democrat running to unseat Republican anti-abortion Sen. Ted Cruz.
She felt like it was her duty. Miller entered the spotlight in March 2023, when she became one of the first five women to sue a state over its abortion ban, in a case known as Zurawski v. Texas. She talked publicly about how, at her 12-week ultrasound when pregnant with twins, she discovered that one of the fetuses she was carrying likely had a devastating anomaly. Testing confirmed it was Trisomy 18, a condition with slim odds of survival. She needed an abortion to improve the chances the healthy twin might live—but her only option for health care involved traveling to Colorado, a trip she made in October 2022.
Miller was one of a group of women who relived the stories of their abortions—intense, private traumas—over and over for large audiences, hoping that doing so would lead Harris to victory. The 2024 election, the first presidential race since the fall of Roe, put an unprecedented focus on abortion rights. Harris regularly devoted events and speech time to the impact of the 2022 Supreme Court decision.
Harris’ campaign represented a shift in how politicians talk about abortion; equally revolutionary was the heavy emphasis on storytellers. In politics, abortion has long been highlighted in abstract terms, with politicians and activists only occasionally sharing personal experiences with the heavily stigmatized healthcare. Now, instead of the exception, personal stories have become the rule, and the microphone handed from professional political actors to people who, had they not sought an abortion, might never have found themselves on the campaign trail. The switch has helped change how Americans talk and think about abortion. But it’s not without its personal costs.
