Amanda Zurawski speaks onstage at the 2024 Democratic National ConventionMother Jones illustration; Chip Somodevilla/Getty
In a coveted primetime speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night, three women shared the stage to speak about their harrowing personal experiences with pregnancy and abortion.
Amanda Zurawski told the story of how she was denied an abortion after going into pre-term labor well before her desired pregnancy was considered viable; the Texas woman developed a life-threatening case of sepsis and spent three days in an intensive care unit. Kentucky’s Hadley Duvall recounted how her stepfather raped her when she was 12, resulting in an (obviously) unwanted pregnancy that she (thankfully) did not carry to term due to a miscarriage. Kaitlyn Joshua discussed being turned away from two hospital emergency rooms that refused to treat her active miscarriage due to Louisiana’s strict abortion laws.
“I was in pain, bleeding so much my husband feared for my life,” Joshua said Monday. “No woman should experience what I endured, but too many have.”
The stories were jarring and emotional, and they contrasted sharply with how many Democrats have addressed abortion in the past. As recently as 2023, President Joe Biden—a devout Catholic—said he was not “big on abortion.”
But now, on the main stage of a national political convention with tens of thousands of attendees and millions more watching from home, the subject finally got stage-time proportional to its strength as a galvanizing political issue. “It’s a shift in the Democratic Party,” Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) tells Mother Jones. “For many years, people wouldn’t even say the word abortion out loud. I would be in a room saying, ‘We’re going to say the a-word here. We’re going to be to the point, because the harms that are being done are very blunt, they’re life and death.'”
The evolution is indicative of the changing of the guards—for starters, a person with ovaries now leads the presidential ticket—but also of abortion’s success at the polls and ballot measures since the Supreme Court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Reproductive rights groups have seen positive outcomes in every election in which abortion rights were tested in state referendums, including in the conservative strongholds of Ohio, Kentucky, and Kansas. Nationally, 63 percent of US adults support abortion in all or most cases, according to Pew Research Center.
On the party’s former messaging regarding abortion, Nebraska Democrat Jane Erdenberger, a convention attendee and former delegate, says: “We weren’t brave enough.”
“The best thing that happened to us as a party was to have Roe v. Wade overturned. People got so complacent. After 50 years, they just assumed it was a given, and now it’s like people are really shocked out of their lethargy,” adds Erdenberger’s husband, Mark Hoeger.
There remains some division among the left on how to discuss reproductive rights. A common rallying cry, including from Democratic Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, is that Democrats are working to reestablish Roe and thwart Republicans from advancing a national abortion ban.
According to some convention-goers and abortion-rights groups, that’s not nearly enough. The National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund (NIRHAF), for example, pushed out an email this week calling for Democrats to “scrap ‘Restore Roe'” from their lexicon.
Instead, NIRH Action Fund vice president Randi Gregory says the party needs to “clearly articulate what it looks like to liberate abortion rights from the chains of government interference.”
Pressley agrees that restoring the constitutional right to obtain an abortion isn’t a sufficient end goal. “Roe was always the floor. It was never the ceiling. Even when we had Roe, there were still gaps in access,” she says, touting her efforts to repeal restrictions on federal funding for the procedure.
But she points out that Democrats are certainly less likely to pass expansive abortion-rights legislation if they aren’t elected in the first place.
“One thing at a time here,” Pressley says. “So we need to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. We need to [get a majority] in the House. We need to get the gavel back, and we need to grow our number in the Senate, because [Harris] can’t do anything without partners.”
More critically, the party can’t do anything about abortion unless they are willing to prominently talk about abortion. Them doing so wasn’t always a guarantee.
“I’ve been in reproductive rights for close to 20 years, and I have never seen abortion this up-front in a presidential race,” says Nourbese Flint, president of All Above All, an abortion rights group. “I’m extremely excited that folks are talking about it—that people are saying the word abortion.”
