These Abortion Storytellers Won’t Be Silenced

It had started with an abnormal Pap smear.

The woman was in her mid-30s, a mother. After further testing, the bad news began to multiply: severe precancerous cells on her cervix, a suspicious growth, and finally, a diagnosis of vaginal cancer—an aggressive and rare disease. The woman would need a hysterectomy and the top portion of her vagina removed. She would have significant, aggressive rounds of chemotherapy. Doctors needed to treat the cancer urgently, in order to save her life.

But amid this whirlwind, the woman got another surprise. She was pregnant. Suddenly it wasn’t a question of when she would begin treatment, it was a question of whether she would be able to treat her cancer at all. Because of the fetus growing inside her, and because she lived in Louisiana.

The woman had been diagnosed just a week or two after the June 24, 2022, fall of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court case that had for decades guaranteed American women the Constitutional right to an abortion. The same day, Louisiana’s so-called “trigger ban” went into effect, effectively banning abortion entirely. One of the few exceptions in state law is if the mother is facing a risk of death.

In this case, the woman’s physician was Nicole Freehill, MD, MPH—an ob-gyn who has become one of Louisiana’s fiercest abortion-ban opponents. “It was very difficult to navigate,” says Dr. Freehill. “Does she fall under the exceptions? Even if she does, how do we document this? How can we move forward?”

The patient was adamant about what treatment she wanted— an abortion—and Dr. Freehill agreed. But she and the team determined that in order to comply with the law as best they understood it, they had to induce labor rather than perform an abortion. Inducing labor at such an early gestation would then by nature end the pregnancy.

“When you induce a pregnancy early on, it takes longer,” Dr. Freehill explains. “It’s a harder process, and you have a much higher risk of complications…. Unfortunately, this patient had her induction, and when she delivered, she hemorrhaged. She lost over a liter of blood. She had to have a blood transfusion that could have been avoided. And that sticks with me.”

Dr. Freehill pauses briefly, her voice brimming with quiet rage. “I did the best that I could by her, but it still was not what should have happened.”

Like so many people I will go on to meet on the ground in Louisiana, Dr. Freehill never expected to fight for reproductive rights so publicly. Horrified and spurred into action by her own experiences treating her patients, she has testified on the floor of the Louisiana State Legislature and given interview after interview—becoming one of the few physicians in a state that has banned abortion who is willing to publicly speak out about the reality of what’s happening in her practice, and the implications of abortion bans on health care professionals.

“For there to be all these penalties and the potential for losing my medical license, being a felon…it is just flabbergasting and just so hard to wrap my head around the lack of trust in the medical community in general and, specifically, ob-gyns,” she says.

On this day, Dr. Freehill is speaking to me as part of her involvement in a project called Abortion in America, headed up by longtime advocate and the former president of Planned Parenthood Cecile Richards. Doctors, religious leaders, abortion patients—they have all come together over the course of four days to share their experiences, their rage, their fears. The goal is simple: to bear witness to what is occurring in Louisiana and try to get the rest of the country to pay attention. They hope that by gathering together and shouting their trauma with one voice, they can make a change.

Dr. Freehill has held it together throughout our interview, but when she begins to discuss why she keeps speaking out, despite her fears that she or her family may be targeted for her activism, she becomes emotional.

“How much worse is it going to get?” she says. “Where are we going? I’m doing my best to fight things getting worse, but I don’t know if that’s going to happen.”

Louisiana now has the distinction of being one of the most restrictive states in the nation for abortion. After the Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson that there is no constitutional right to abortion, effectively handing the decision back to the states, Louisiana’s “trigger law” went into effect. It is now one of 14 states where abortion is completely banned with limited exceptions.

The only circumstances under which a pregnant person can get an abortion in the state are if their life is at risk, if their physical health is at serious risk, or if the fetus is not expected to survive the pregnancy.

A bill allowing for abortion in the case of rape or incest, put forward by Democratic State Representative Delisha Boyd, failed this year. Before the bill went to a vote, Boyd shared, publicly for the first time, her own story of being conceived when her teenage mother was the victim of a statutory rape. She hoped it might sway some lawmakers and the state’s governor, Jeff Landry, to agree to put rape and incest exceptions into state law (it didn’t). She’s still trying, because she’s seen the depravity to which Republican lawmakers will subject their women constituents.

“We,” she tells me, meaning women, “have to start voting like our lives depend on it. I can’t speak for the rest of the United States, but in Louisiana we have become an endangered species.”

For Boyd and all of the other storytellers who came and shared during the four-day event, the fight feels existential.

“Our state, as we see every single day, is constantly showing us that they don’t care about women and they don’t care about women’s health care,” says Kaitlyn Joshua, a community organizer who became a nationally recognized reproductive rights advocate, including as a 2024 Glamour Woman of the Year, following her own experience post-Dobbs. “So I am energized to advocate on behalf of us and make sure that we are at least sounding the alarm on this so that we’re saving more lives and not just taking it just because they’re dishing it out.”

Outside of states with abortion bans, though, it’s hard sometimes to get people to really feel it. To understand that the loss of bodily autonomy is not just something that’s happening in some faraway land, but that it’s happening to American women. In Louisiana, and in the now 21 states that ban or restrict abortion. Every day, constantly. Now.

To put it bluntly, for those of us who live in states with access to abortion, the fall of Roe was awful and terrible, yes. But we could argue it didn’t affect us, not really. After all, if we needed abortion care, we could still access it. It’s chillingly easy to put states we don’t live in out of sight, and out of our minds. And then there’s who ask questions like, do people “down there” even want abortions? Do they even care to fight?

The answer, I’ve learned, is yes. In fact, they are fighting so hard and with such vigor that Richards has dedicated the past year to ensuring their stories be told, while fighting her own personal battle against brain cancer.

It started in Louisiana, then Florida. Now, Richards and her team are officially codifying their storytelling project, naming it Abortion in America. On Wednesday, they are launching a website and social media accounts where the stories will live. The goal? Make everyone pay attention to what is happening with reproductive rights on the ground.

For Richards, this work doesn’t feel like a choice.

“If we had come down here and people had said, ‘No way, we’re giving up and we don’t have any stories to tell or we don’t want to tell them,’ I might have had to rethink this,” Richards tells me.

What she found instead was not just people telling stories. They were shouting. They were screaming, begging for anyone to listen. So, she did.

Richards, of course, needs no introduction. The former longtime president of Planned Parenthood, best-selling memoirist, and lifelong advocate for reproductive health care’s reputation precedes her. But long before she was The Cecile Richards, she was a young advocate in New Orleans and she was falling in love. Richards met her husband, Kirk Adams, there while they both were working to organize hotel workers.

“I personally have a soft spot in my heart for Louisiana. I always knew I would be back here,” she says.

They married, had three children, and lived in New York and DC. But a few years after Richards left Planned Parenthood in 2018, the couple decided to move back to where they had met all those years ago. They bought a charming traditional home with a wraparound porch on a quiet side street in the city’s Lower Garden District in 2023 and began making plans to relocate, putting their NYC apartment on the market.

What happened next was documented in an early 2024 article for New York Magazine, in which Richards, 67, shared with the world that she had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer that has a median survival rate of 15 months. After her diagnosis Richards began an intensive treatment plan in New York City (they kept their apartment). She’s continuing other advocacy work, including developing an abortion chatbot, Charley, with her former Planned Parenthood colleague and longtime collaborator Tom Subak. But her heart was still in Louisiana.

“It’s a state worth fighting for,” she tells me. “It’s such a misunderstood part of the country. People kind of dismiss it, like, ‘What are those people thinking?’ Yet there’s good people every day who are waking up, figuring out what they can do to make a difference…New York and Washington are fine places. And I loved living there. But I wanted to be back at the grassroots and I want to be back doing what I can to support people making change.”

So starting in early 2024, Richards received treatment in New York from Monday to Thursday. And then, on many weekends, she traveled to Louisiana, arriving Thursday night and flying back on Sunday to make her Monday morning treatment.

It’s a grueling commute to do so often, with or without brain cancer, but Richards was determined to make this happen. It started with the storytelling event, held on the second to last weekend of June, coincidentally falling two years to the day since Roe fell. None of the participants, or even Richards herself, knew what it would become. But it soon became apparent to all who were there that something had been set ablaze.

“I believe so fiercely in the power of these personal stories to transform the way people think and talk about abortion and reproductive freedom in this country,” she tells me.

Haleigh Meyers is not the type of person to ordinarily open herself to strangers and share intimate details about her life. But there she was, in front of a microphone and next to a bunch of strangers, telling the story of her miscarriage.

“When I miscarried at home, it was really scary,” she says. “My boyfriend was really helpful through the whole thing. I don’t know another man that would’ve done [that], clean up behind me. I was running through the house. I couldn’t sit still.”

But when Meyers finally made it to the hospital, she says she was met with skepticism instead of compassion, a phenomenon that other women have reported in abortion-ban states, where a miscarriage may be scrutinized. This situation, which Joshua also experienced, is thought to be a result of the fears physicians in those states now have regarding miscarriage management. The thought is that doctors worry they will be investigated for providing an abortion while treating a miscarriage and so may be reluctant to confirm a pregnancy at all.

According to Meyers, the doctor asked her, “Are you sure you were actually pregnant?”

“I felt insulted,” she says. “I was confused more than anything. Why would you even ask me that? Before I even went to the hospital, when I [miscarried] at home, it was really scary…It was definitely an experience. For the doctor to just say, ‘Hey, are you sure you’re even pregnant?’ Come on. I’ve never been through anything like that in my life. And then to go to the hospital and get insulted like that…It still feels like a dream, honestly.”

Sitting across from her is Joshua, who met Meyers a few years ago when the organization she worked for was doing hurricane relief. After weeks of coaxing, Joshua has convinced Meyers to share her story.

And it did take a lot of coaxing. Despite the team having deep connections in Louisiana and working for months to encourage women to speak out, Meyers was one of the few women who have experienced a miscarriage or abortion since Dobbs who was persuaded to share her story.

Thus, the story of what is really happening on the ground in Louisiana to ensure women can get the reproductive care they need is one that has, for now, been largely entrusted to the handful of physicians like Dr. Freehill who feel compelled to advocate for change. And women like Joshua and Meyers, who speak not just for themselves but so many others.

“Even just sitting across the table having conversation with you is a form of advocacy and making sure that we’re doing the work to try and uplift this concern and really get our lawmakers to do something about it,” Joshua tells Meyers.

Joshua met Richards and her writing and business partner Lauren Peterson when they were doing their first outreach for the storyteller project earlier this year. A petite mother of two who has spent her career in community organizing, Joshua has become, rather inadvertently, one of the most prominent advocates for abortion rights in Louisiana, if not the country.

Joshua has been key to much of the groundwork in Louisiana, finding people to speak and arranging the schedule. Some, like Meyers, are people she knows personally. Others are prominent reproductive-justice advocates. The executive director of ACLU of Louisiana, Alanah Odoms, participated, as did Boyd and representatives from Planned Parenthood. One of the storytellers, Jennifer Avegno, MD, served as head of the New Orleans Department of Public Health during the pandemic and came to speak about her experiences dealing with the ban as an emergency room physician.

The atmosphere, though heavy at times, was familial and infused with a distinct matriarchal energy that is invigorating and powerful. Richards’s daughter, Hannah, worked on the project that weekend alongside her mother; both Joshua and her fellow advocate and storyteller Nancy Davis bring their young kids along. Dr. Avegno chose to be interviewed by her own daughter, Lucy Wagner, a college student. When, during their interview, Wagner laid her head on her mother’s shoulder after saying how much she has been inspired by her, all the moms in the room collectively swooned.

Between interviews, Joshua, Peterson, and I chat about raising toddlers and commiserate about our shared mom guilt over leaving our kids behind to do this work.

Joshua, though, like Richards and Peterson, believes in the power of storytelling to make a change. Given her experience, how could she not? Two years ago she was a normal girl from Baton Rouge, and now she’s being flown around the country by the literal president.

“I have no regret sharing because I know for a fact hundreds of women are now being more vocal about this once taboo issue, especially in Louisiana,” she tells me. “You would never, ever hear a reporter say abortion…And I think it’s very interesting that we’re now saying and calling this what it is. Abortion is health care. ”

As a journalist I have devoted my career to the idea that storytelling matters. I obviously believe that it does. But I’ll admit, my belief in its power has been tested over time. In the industry we’ve been told relentlessly that we aren’t reaching people the way we used to (no one wants to read anymore, after all) and that we need to distill our points down to the most basic of facts to capture the brief attention spans of our audience. We’re told we need a salacious hook to get people to pay attention, that ordinary stories of everyday people aren’t interesting enough to drive change.

Simultaneously, I have been haunted by the idea that people in places like New York, where I live, and California, where I’m from, don’t actually understand how acutely horrifying the state of reproductive care is for women in states that have banned abortion. Yet I’ve felt at a loss for what I, or any journalist, can do to make them pay attention.

All of this is to say that when Richards and Peterson invited me to come witness their first iteration of their then-unnamed storytelling project in Louisiana, I was both excited and intrigued—but the little, pessimistic part of me was skeptical. Could gathering a group of women together and having them share their stories actually make a difference in any of this?

Now, though, I reflect on how—although the situation in Louisiana is dire, and many of the stories were horrifying and heartbreaking—the abortion storytelling project exuded so much joy. And even more surprisingly, hope. There was a collective sense in the room that if women keep telling their stories, keep speaking out, and keep banding together, they can make a difference. I believe they can, too.

And it’s not just Louisiana. The state is just a microcosm of the movements happening in all states with abortion bans or near bans, from Kansas and Arkansas to Alabama. If a state has tried to take rights away from women, you can guarantee that those women are there, fighting back and not letting go.

“It’s indefensible what’s happening in Louisiana, and I think the more that people hear what’s going on and can empathize with these experiences, that’s how we’re going to change it,” Richards tells me.

Since I attended the storytelling event in June, Richards and her team have traveled to Florida, speaking to storytellers there as well. They hired staff (as well as “super volunteers,” as she calls them) and officially named the project. After its public launch, they hope to travel to more states, where they can bring more stories to more people, and as Richards puts it, “bring greater visibility to stories with the power to shift public opinion in favor of abortion rights and keep these stories alive over a longer period of time.”

After all, she says, there’s too much at stake for us not to listen.

“Fighting for these issues of bodily autonomy, of the rights to make decisions about your pregnancy, to have a healthy child if you want to—these are fundamental issues that cross party lines, certainly that cross generations,” she says. “Being able to find ways for people to get in that fight, it’s really important. That’s the only way we change things. It’s not from the top down. It’s going to be from the bottom up.”