Anna Igler is, like Dennard, an abortion storyteller who has been both a doctor and a patient. An ob-gyn in the Green Bay area of Wisconsin, who has regularly overseen births and performed abortions, she ended a pregnancy of her own at twenty-five weeks, in 2020, after her fetus was diagnosed with a devastating brain abnormality. Unable to be treated in Wisconsin after twenty-one weeks, she travelled to Colorado for the procedure. On the morning of June 24, 2022, Igler was at work in her office when she received a text from a friend. “Anna, I’m so sorry,” it read. Igler was perplexed. She had not been following the news that day and was not expecting the Dobbs ruling. “Then I got the gist of the message, and I was, like, Holy shit, you’ve got to be kidding me, it really happened.” Wisconsin would now enforce an 1849 law that made it illegal to perform an abortion except to save the life of a mother. (The law has since been overturned by a circuit-court judge.)
Igler had rarely discussed her abortion, but she reached out to a Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter, who told her story. Soon, she was taping an advertisement for Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat in a tough reëlection race. (He won.) The following year, she did an ad for a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate (who also won), and she is now featured in a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for American Bridge, a Democratic political-action committee. In the ad, she says, with red eyes, that she ended a wanted pregnancy “because my baby was very sick.” She has spoken at press conferences and rallies, and she told me that, for a few days after each event, she cries a lot. “And then I just do it all over again when someone asks,” she said. “Because I have to. This is too important not to talk about.”
I met Igler on a Saturday morning at the headquarters of the Brown County Democratic Party, where she had agreed to speak to a dozen volunteers ahead of a door-knocking session. Before she was introduced, she stood to the side, and I asked what she was thinking. She answered that she had got into the right frame of mind by listening to the raucous song “Know Your Enemy,” by Rage Against the Machine. (Lyrics: “I’ve got no patience now / So sick of complacence now.”) As she headed toward the lectern, she whispered, “I do know my enemy.”
Igler told the group the story of her pregnancy. “Her name is Nora Rose,” she began, “and she should be almost three and a half years old right now.” She said that she fears another ban on abortion in Wisconsin if Republicans win local elections, and a national ban if Trump wins. “Politicians like Trump do not have the expertise, knowledge, or understanding to make any of these medical decisions,” she said. “Why is our country headed back to the nineteen-fifties?” She ended with a firm warning: “Republicans have no idea the powerful rage they have unleashed in us. We are coming for those who seek to control and oppress us.”
In past years, such an event might have focussed on tax policy or school funding. Instead, for twenty-five minutes, Igler went on to answer questions about intimate details of pregnancy and abortion, including in-vitro fertilization, a procedure that she has used successfully since her abortion. One woman talked about period trackers. A man explained that his sister in Texas had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, and asked whether that termination would be called an abortion. (There is widespread confusion about this, and, as a result, some doctors have delayed lifesaving care.) Later, Igler said that people often approach her after rallies to tell her their stories: “I consider it the start of another MeToo movement, with women coming out and saying publicly, ‘I had an abortion.’ ”
Even for some pro-choice women, this means talking about lingering shame and regret. As the volunteers rose to collect their door-knocking literature, Barbara Dorff, a former Green Bay city-council member who had been listening thoughtfully from the second row, said that the word “abortion” saddens her. Now sixty-nine, she explained that she had lost a pregnancy in 1982. “You think you’re safe after twelve weeks, right?” she said. “And then one day I just started bleeding.” Her fetus had died. A doctor performed a dilation and curettage to clean her womb. When the nurse referred to the procedure as an abortion, Dorff was devastated. To her, the word suggested that she had made a choice to abort her child, and that she had done something wrong. “It’s a hard word, it’s a harsh word,” she said. “There is a feeling or a weight behind that word.”
That afternoon, I trailed Christy Welch, the chair of the Brown County Democratic Party, as she met voters in the Green Bay suburb of Allouez. Linda Wallenfang, a sixty-four-year-old former union member at Georgia-Pacific, who is now retired, invited Welch into her living room and took a seat on the couch. When the topic turned to abortion, Wallenfang said that she has qualms about the issue but believes it’s none of the government’s business. She volunteered a story about the shame her late mother felt after having two abortions in the fifties, the first when she was a teen-ager and the second when she already had two young children and was feeling overwhelmed. “My mom went to her grave thinking she was a murderer. We told her God forgave her,” Wallenfang said. When people hear stories about “what happens to real women,” she added, “it changes your perspective.”