A Louder Voice in Fighting Abortion Bans: Men in Red States

The Washington Post / Emily Wax-Thibodeaux

16:56 JST, September 4, 2024

Thomas Stovall grew up in a strict Baptist family in Mississippi and always believed that anyone involved with abortion was destined for hell.

But his lifelong conviction crumbled when his wife, Chelsea, was 20 weeks pregnant with their third child. Tests showed a severely malformed and underdeveloped fetus, one that was sure to be stillborn if carried to term. There was other devastating news, too. Continuing with the pregnancy could threaten Chelsea’s health and future fertility, doctors warned.

The couple live in Arkansas, which has a near-total ban on abortion and is surrounded by states with their own highly restrictive laws. So they drove 400 miles to reach a clinic in Illinois where they could end the pregnancy. As they did, Stovall says he’d decided he was “dead wrong about abortion being a sin.”

He began knocking on doors, hoping to change other men’s minds and help get an abortion measure on the state ballot this fall.

Two years after the Supreme Court toppled federal protections for the procedure, growing numbers of men in red states are speaking out in defense of reproductive rights because of the harrowing experiences they’ve seen wives or partners go through when pregnancies went tragically awry, endangering their health or ability to bear children. Some, like Stovall, had been staunch abortion opponents; others concede they’d given the issue little thought until it hit close to home.

“It’s like an ocean change for men, and conversation has shifted to include men in high-profile ways,” said Oren Jacobson, a co-founder of Men4Choice. The group, formed nearly a decade ago, has intensified its advocacy in the past year as more states criminalized abortion. Florida is a prime focus.

“When we think about our organizing strategy, it’s [to] help men see the harm” that such laws cause, including harm to their families, Jacobson said. It’s also to put the issue in a broader context for them, he added. “It’s not just about abortion. It’s about freedom, it’s about power. It is an issue that impacts all of us and the women and family we love.”

The emergence of men’s voices in deeply conservative states – several with measures to protect abortion on the ballot in November – has been particularly striking.

In a series of posts on X that went viral this spring, Texas radio DJ Ryan Hamilton detailed what happened to his wife, Jess, during a prolonged miscarriage at 13 weeks. She was refused treatment and sent home by two Dallas-area medical facilities where doctors cited the state’s abortion restrictions, Hamilton said. She ended up bleeding heavily for more than 24 hours until she lost consciousness on their bathroom floor.

Until then, Hamilton acknowledges, “abortion care was not on my radar.” He now encourages other men to tell their stories on a podcast he began hosting this summer as his wife recovered. It’s called “Correct,” and his introduction explains, “In the wake of our family’s tragedy, and in the hope of affecting change, I’ve decided to keep this conversation going.”

“Men have to have a voice and step up on this,” he said in an interview. “This is not just an issue for women to talk about on their own. And I’m all in.”

The results of the latest Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll found that 1 in 5 men called abortion a top voting issue for them this year. While it resonates more among Democratic men, with 34 percent identifying it as one of their most important issues, 15 percent of both independent and Republican men also say it is one of the single most important issues in their vote – adding to the GOP’s challenge ahead of November’s presidential election.

By comparison, in a 2019 Post-ABC poll, fewer than 10 percent of men said abortion was a top voting issue, regardless of party identification.

“Men have strong feelings about this issue [now], men care about this issue.” said Tresa Undem, a partner with the nonpartisan public opinion research group PerryUndem, who has studied abortion for more than 20 years. The 2022 Dobbs decision that reversed Roe v. Wade was a turning point. “Post-Dobbs, they see this has impacted their own personal rights and feelings.”

Yet connecting the dots between miscarriage care and abortion is still not clear to many men, said Greer Donley, a national expert on abortion law and associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh law school.

“The silver lining of Dobbs is that it forced people to talk about what was stigmatized and shrouded in mystery – miscarriage, fetal anomalies, stillbirth,” she said. They’re now realizing the range of scenarios that can be directly impacted by state bans “and the end of this illusion that you can separate elective abortion from emergency abortions.”

Men have an integral role here, in Donley’s view. “Abortion is now a crime and it’s impacting men and women – families – in ways that are unpredictable,” she said. “Men telling their own stories … is going to be a big way to change hearts and minds.”

Some men are also vocally supporting in vitro fertilization, which in conservative states like Alabama has been caught in the abortion crossfire because of the embryos created – and then potentially discarded – as part of the IVF process. The most prominent ally of late has been Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

During the party’s recent convention, Walz shared his and his wife’s years-long struggle to have a family and what he described as “the hell that is infertility.” He said he signed legislation protecting reproductive freedom because in Minnesota, “we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make those same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.”

Abortion opponents say that individual stories, however wrenching, do not signal a broader crisis. The president of Texas Right to Life, for one, blames a liberal conspiracy between media and doctors seeking to make a political statement about the bans. John Seago said his organization is working with other red states to clarify that miscarriage care is allowed when there is no longer a fetal heartbeat or when an ectopic pregnancy is diagnosed.

“There has been a lot of misunderstanding,” he said Friday, inviting men who are upset about what happened to their wives “to come join this movement in making the laws more clear to doctors and hospitals.”

Part of the public discussion is being propelled by men whose wives have been plaintiffs in lawsuits brought by the Center for Reproductive Rights. The litigation’s goal: more definitive medical exceptions to guide physicians fearful of running afoul of those laws.

In Idaho, John Adkins raced his wife from their home in Caldwell, a suburb of Boise, to Portland, Ore., last year after an ultrasound showed a fetal anomaly so complex that she was likely to suffer potentially deadly complications. Jennifer was nearing the end of her first trimester.

“I felt like a fugitive,” said Adkins, 37, a sixth-generation Idahoan. He remembers local doctors telling the couple that ending her pregnancy at that point would be illegal. (This June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Idaho hospitals should be allowed to perform emergency abortion care to stabilize patients despite the state ban.)

“What we went through, it violates all common sense,” Adkins said. He vowed that day he would “never again sit on the sidelines when it came to abortion rights.” He has since attended rallies and related community events. “I had not really known that miscarriages would be impacted like this. It was really the first time as a man that I realized what this all meant.”

Travis and Taylor Edwards took a similarly desperate drive from Austin to Colorado when she was 17 weeks along last year, grieving the imminent loss of her pregnancy. Tests had shown the fetus had a fatal condition.

Texas hospitals would not perform the needed abortion, according to the couple, and she endured a dangerous two-week delay in care.

“It was absurd what we went through and what others are going through,” said Edwards, 33. He was raised in a Catholic family that considered abortion evil but turned away from those beliefs as a teenager. “Everyone thought ‘abortion is this dirty word.’ But it was then that I realized it was end-of-life care – and lifesaving care for my wife.”

He describes himself as “so naive” before all this happened and says he now is very motivated to “get involved in this fight.” He was set to talk about his experience – including the subsequent birth of a son – at a campaign event for Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.), who is running against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in November.

One legal historian on abortion traces the evolution of the debate, starting with pre-Roe days when male lawmakers and doctors dominated the discussion.

“They didn’t think what women thought would make an impact,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis. “They were told what they thought wasn’t enough to move the issue.”

After Roe became the law of the land in 1973, however, women’s own concerns grew in importance and slogans like “My body, my choice” put them at the center of the debate. The rise of abortion and reproductive health care clinics was seen as “empowering women” in largely female safe spaces.

“It became unclear to some men if they should say anything at all,” Ziegler said.

The Dobbs ruling upended everything again by allowing state-by-state decisions on the legality of abortion. “When it’s not just an abstract concept and that right is taken away, then it starts to impact everyone’s life in unpredictable ways,” she said. “And the more tragedies that occur, the more comfortable men are going to be to speak out.”

For Stovall and his wife, their loss two years ago remains painful. After the day-long drive from their home in Fayetteville, Ark., they were greeted at the Illinois abortion clinic by protesters displaying massive pictures of dismembered babies.

“It was barbaric and made me just sick when we were already mourning this very much wanted pregnancy,” he recounted on Monday. “I was once that way, too, thinking you would go to hell if you had an abortion. But it wasn’t that simple.”

“I was lied to,” said Stovall, 30. “If I can change, others can too.”

The Arkansas Supreme Court recently upheld the state’s rejection of signatures that abortion rights supporters had gathered for a ballot measure to prohibit abortion bans before the first 20 weeks of gestation. Stovall had been part of that canvassing for a group called Arkansans for Limited Government. He vows to start anew next year.