It was 7:15 a.m. on Sunday, and a blood-orange sun had turned the sky lavender. Dr. Kristin Lyerly was getting ready to leave.
She had laundry going, and her bags half-packed. She felt as if she might be forgetting something. She was about to make the 400-mile drive from her home in De Pere, Wis., for a 10-day stint at a medical center in Hibbing, Minn., where she has been working as an obstetrician-gynecologist following the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Lyerly has another job, too: running for Congress.
Abortion rights have become central to the fight for control of the White House and Congress, and Democrats have worked hard to bring the issue to life through the stories of women who have had abortions. Lyerly, though, is doing something a little rarer: campaigning as a Democrat who can talk about providing reproductive care in post-Roe America.
She said she had bumped into children she delivered on the trail. She has been approached by women at campaign events seeking basic information about handling an unwanted pregnancy or a miscarriage. She hasn’t heeded the advice that she said she got from men suggesting she talk about the issue a little bit less.
“Reproductive rights,” she told a group of teachers who gathered to knock on doors in Green Bay, Wis., last weekend, “are on everybody’s mind.”
Lyerly’s district, Wisconsin’s Eighth, encompasses a rural swath of the northeastern part of the state, the city of Green Bay and the peninsula that looks like the state’s pinkie finger dipping into Lake Michigan. It is difficult territory for Democrats. Former Representative Mike Gallagher, a Republican who chafed at Trump’s influence over his party, held it easily for seven years before suddenly retiring in April; a Trump-endorsed former gas station chain owner, Tony Wied, is favored to win the seat.
Lyerly, though, is betting that running on reproductive rights can help Democrats make inroads even here, in a culturally conservative and heavily Catholic part of the state. And as part of the recent explosion of Democratic activism in the state that my colleague Jonathan Weisman wrote about this morning, she has helped to recruit a cohort of down-ballot candidates in the area who share that belief.
“Women deserve better. We’re not just machines. You can’t just change out a part,” she told me in an interview. “We are human beings, and it’s not just us who go through these things — it’s the people in our lives, our partners and our kids and the people who love us.”
‘We have to talk about it’
There are two members of Congress who have worked as OB-GYN doctors, Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas and Representative Michael Burgess of Texas. Both are Republican men who praised the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe.
Lyerly is one of two female OB-GYN doctors running to join them. The other, Kelly Morrison, a Democrat who is running in the suburban Minnesota district currently represented by the retiring Democrat Dean Phillips, is favored to win.
It was not very long ago that Lyerly, who is a mother of four, worried that her background — which includes a stint working as an assistant in an abortion clinic early in her career — could be a political liability. When she ran unsuccessfully for the State Assembly in 2020, she said, she didn’t talk about it at all.
Lyerly went to work at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sheboygan, Wis., in early 2022, and watched as abortions were outlawed in the state in an instant.
“I threw caution to the wind, and said, ‘We have to talk about it,’” Lyerly said.
She joined a lawsuit challenging the state’s 1849 abortion ban and began practicing in Minnesota. Planned Parenthood has since resumed providing abortions in Wisconsin, but she has continued to work out of state.
“I’ve had patients arrive bleeding — wanted pregnancy — prior to 24 weeks, right in that 22-24 week span,” Lyerly said. “In Wisconsin, I would be wondering, ‘If I do her abortion to save her life, am I going to get in trouble? Am I going to lose my license?’ In Minnesota, I didn’t have to think twice about it.”
Another political transformation was happening in Wisconsin: After liberals secured a majority on the State Supreme Court last year, the State Assembly’s heavily gerrymandered maps were thrown out. Lyerly and other local Democrats worked to find candidates for every race they could — a group that included women and L.G.B.T.Q. candidates — and then Lyerly jumped into the congressional race in April.
“We are the gals, the gays and a few good men,” Lyerly said. “I do believe that it is a winning issue.”
Hoping for a quiet majority
One of those gals is Christy Welch, a former manufacturing executive and first-time State Assembly candidate, who was pounding the pavement in a biting wind on Saturday as part of the door-knocking effort. I asked to accompany her because I was curious to hear how she — and the voters she spoke with — would talk about abortion rights.
At each door, Welch handed voters a piece of campaign literature and asked them which of the issues listed resonated most. A 19-year-old voter named Skye Mallori was quick to pick reproductive rights.
“That’s a big reason why I’m standing here right now,” Welch said, explaining that she had gotten involved in local Democratic politics after Roe fell.
“It’s really backward. It’s so cool that you’re doing this,” said Valeria Gallardo, 30, after Welch knocked on her door.
Welch did not, however, bring up reproductive rights unless a voter did first — reflecting a touch of caution that still characterizes Democrats’ approach to abortion here, even for Lyerly.
“It’s one of the most Catholic districts in the country,” said Lyerly, who added that she chose her words carefully. “We don’t talk about abortion because it’s too harsh of a word, but we do talk about reproductive rights.”
The candidates here have also become accustomed to finding voters who want to support them quietly. Lyerly said one woman had come to the local Democratic Party headquarters recently, asking if she could write the party a check without her husband finding out. There are sticky notes that voters can take to stick in bathrooms, urging women to vote for Lyerly or Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Woman to woman,” one note said, “your vote is private.”
Welch spoke on Saturday with a voter who told her that she planned to vote for her, Lyerly, and other Democrats up and down the ticket. She had grown up in a deeply conservative household, she said, and she didn’t like the idea of late-term abortions, but she planned to vote for candidates who supported a woman’s right to them.
“If anybody asked, I’m not so conservative this year, because they’re so far off the rails,” she told me.
The voter initially told me her full name and said I could quote her. But about an hour after we spoke, she called to ask that I print only her first name, Emily, because she did not want to upset her conservative friends.
Voters like Emily are exactly who Lyerly and Welch are trying to reach.
“In these small communities,” Lyerly said, “they do it kind of quietly.”
Swing state voters: We want your junk mail. Really.
If you live in one of the seven key battleground states, your mailbox is probably stuffed with political mailers from candidates up and down the ballot.
We’d like to see them.
Submit photos of your political mailers here.
THE MOMENT
Through the bulletproof glass
Each week, I’m highlighting a single image from the campaign. This photograph, taken by Jamie Kelter Davis, comes from the Trump rally I attended on Sunday in Juneau, Wis. It shows the thick sheet of bulletproof glass that has, after an attempt on Trump’s life in July, become a fixture at outdoor campaign events.
If you want to get a close-up view of former President Donald Trump at one of his rallies, you have to show up hours in advance, often before sunrise. And you might find yourself looking right at a heavy sheet of bulletproof glass.
The glass can obscure views of the former president, and when the sun is bright, it can look more like a mirror than a window. That’s a disappointment to some of Trump’s supporters — and a special challenge for photographers covering the event.
On Sunday, Jamie Kelter Davis decided to make the glare part of the visual story. While other photographers were standing by the side of the stage, where they had a clear view of Trump, Davis seized the opportunity to get right in front of the glass.
“I love reflections, but it’s never really worked out with that glass super well. The opportunity to be so close gave us the opportunity to play with it more,” said Davis, who added that it felt like a “luxury” to get a whole minute or two up front to make an image that showed Trump, the crowd and a flag hanging from a crane above them, all at once.
“That reflection is all about balancing,” Davis said, “lining up the elements in the reflection so it makes sense and is not confusing.”
The post The OB-GYN Running on Abortion Rights in Conservative Wisconsin appeared first on New York Times.
