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Protesters rally at Monroe Park on July 8.
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Pro-choice advocates attend a rally at Monroe Park on July 8.
In 1994, Kerry Mills and her future husband were living in a cramped apartment in the Fan. He was working as a carpenter and musician; she was fresh out of graduate school and lacked steady employment. “That’s when we found ourselves pregnant,” Mills says. “It wasn’t like we weren’t being careful or anything. We were using birth control, and it was just one of those — nothing’s 100%, except not doing it, right?”
Mills and her boyfriend talked through the options for two weeks. Complicating matters was the fact that they both wanted to start a family. “I always knew I would be a mother, and it was always part of the plan,” she says. But neither had health insurance and their housing situation wasn’t stable. They decided they weren’t ready.
“The narrative that’s out there is one of, you know, babies being saved, of people who are irresponsible, using [abortion] as birth control, all of that,” Mills says. “None of that is real.”
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s late June decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, pro-choice advocates are mobilizing and hunkering down for a protracted legal and political fight as Republican-led states across the country enact new restrictions or ban abortion procedures altogether. In states where abortion is still legal, such as Virginia, it’s not just about protecting access to abortion, they say, but protecting “abortion health care,” which includes access to contraception, hormone replacement therapy for transgender patients and health care for the economically disadvantaged.
Pro-choice proponents are also working to fill a void in the national debate by encouraging women and transgender people who’ve had abortions to speak out. Despite being a common procedure — one in five pregnancies ended in abortion in 2020, according to the Guttmacher Institute — the social stigma surrounding abortion has long discouraged many from sharing their experiences. This void, advocates say, has allowed pro-life political and religious leaders to shape the narrative.
“Every abortion is justified when you hear why the person got an abortion. When you hear a person’s story, it’s very hard to say, ‘No, you should not have had access to that health care,’ ” says Han Jones, political director for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia. “It’s one of the reasons storytelling is so impactful. … There are a million reasons why a person needed to have an abortion, but we don’t always hear those reasons spoken out loud.”
In Virginia, time is of the essence. Advocates worry the state, one of the South’s remaining “safe havens” for abortion access post-Roe, is precariously close to losing that access. Republicans now control state government and hold a majority in the House of Delegates. Gov. Glenn Youngkin is calling for legislation during the next General Assembly session to ban abortion after 15 weeks and has said he’ll sign any anti-abortion bill that makes it to his desk.
“Every abortion is justified when you hear why the person got an abortion. When you hear a person’s story, it’s very hard to say, ‘No, you should not have had access to that health care.’ ” —Han Jones, political director, Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia
Democrats still have a 21-19 majority in the state Senate, making passage of anti-abortion legislation next year an uphill climb. The GOP’s grip on Virginia politics is also tenuous. Youngkin won the governorship in 2021, but only by 2 percentage points. Over the last decade, Democrats have dominated statewide elections, and the last Republican presidential candidate to win Virginia was George W. Bush, in 2004. With most Virginians supporting at least some access to abortion (88%, according to a Roanoke College poll released in early June), state Democrats are expected to push abortion rights to the top of their political agenda in 2023, when all 140 seats of the General Assembly are up for election.
But while recent polling shows abortion rising as a key voter issue, there’s competition. Heightened partisanship and a national discourse splintered by an array of political bogeymen — rising inflation, gun violence, voting rights and the Supreme Court’s emboldened conservative majority — threaten to crowd out the abortion debate.
Lucy Hartman, organizing director for Planned Parenthood Advocates of Virginia, says the nonprofit will do everything in its power to ensure abortion “doesn’t slip from the headlines.” Key to that effort is overcoming the social stigma, she says, by encouraging those who’ve experienced abortion to tell their stories.
“When news coverage does not center patient, real-life stories, what tends to happen is it takes this very common part of health care, abortion, and turns it into a faraway, theoretical, abstract thing,” she says. “If more people knew just how common abortion is, I think that would dispel some of the feeling that it’s far away.”
For Kerry Mills, now 57, terminating her first pregnancy afforded her time to get her life in order. She and her boyfriend moved to the city’s North Side, married and had their first and only child in 1996.
“I had a job. We had insurance. Our housing situation was more stable,” Mills recalls. “It was like it was a brand-new day.”
