Like Dennard, Anna Igler is an abortion storyteller who has been both doctor and patient. She is an OB-GYN in the Green Bay, Wisconsin area who has regularly attended births and performed abortions. In 2020, she herself terminated a pregnancy at 25 weeks after her fetus was diagnosed with a devastating brain abnormality. Unable to receive treatment in Wisconsin at 21 weeks, she traveled 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 hadn’t been following the news that day and hadn’t expected the Dobbs ruling. “Then I got the gist of the message and just thought, ‘Holy shit, you can’t be serious, it really happened.'” Wisconsin would now enforce an 1849 law that banned abortions unless they were performed to save the mother’s life. (The law has since been overturned by a district judge.)
Igler had rarely spoken about her abortion, but she turned to a Green Bay Press Gazette reporter who told her story. Soon after, she shot a commercial for Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat who was in a tough race for reelection. (He won.) The following year, she shot a commercial for a Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate (who also won), and is now part of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign for American Bridge, a Democratic political action committee. In the commercial, she says, red-eyed, that she terminated a desired pregnancy “because my baby was very sick.” She has spoken at press conferences and rallies, and told me that she cries a lot for a few days after each event. “And then I just do it all over again if somebody asks me to,” she said. “Because I have to. This is too important not to talk about.”
I met Igler on a Saturday morning at the Brown County Democratic Party headquarters, where she had agreed to speak to a dozen volunteers before a door-to-door session. Before she was introduced, she stood to the side and I asked her what she was thinking. She said she had gotten in the mood by listening to Rage Against the Machine’s wild song “Know Your Enemy” (lyrics: “I’ve got no patience now / I’m so sick of complacency now.”) As she walked toward the lectern, she whispered, “I 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 now.” She said she feared another abortion ban in Wisconsin if Republicans win local elections, and a national ban if Trump wins. “Politicians like Trump don’t have the expertise, knowledge or understanding to make these medical decisions,” she said. “Why is our country going back to the 1950s?” She ended with a stark warning: “Republicans have no idea what tremendous anger they have unleashed in us. We are coming to get those who want to control and oppress us.”
In previous years, such an event might have been about tax policy or school funding. Instead, Igler spent 25 minutes answering questions about intimate details of pregnancy and abortion, including in-vitro fertilization, a procedure she has used successfully since her abortion. One woman talked about menstrual trackers. A man explained that his sister had suffered an ectopic pregnancy in Texas and asked if that termination was considered an abortion. (There is widespread confusion about this, and it is why some doctors have delayed life-saving procedures.) Later, Igler said that people often come up to her after rallies to tell her their stories: “I look at it as the beginning of another MeToo movement, where women are coming out publicly and saying, ‘I had an abortion.'”
Even for some women who support abortion rights, that means talking about lingering shame and regret. As volunteers stood to collect their doorstep pamphlets, Barbara Dorff, a former Green Bay City Council member who had been listening intently in the second row, said the word “abortion” made her sad. Now 69, she explained that she lost a pregnancy in 1982. “You think after 12 weeks you’re safe, right?” she said. “And then one day I just started bleeding.” Her fetus had died. A doctor performed a dilation and curettage to clean out her uterus. When the nurse referred to the procedure as an abortion, Dorff was devastated. To her, the word suggested that she had chosen to abort her child and that she had done something wrong. “It’s a harsh word, a hard word,” she said. “There’s a feeling or a heaviness behind that word.”
That afternoon, I accompanied Christy Welch, the chair of the Brown County Democratic Party, as she met with voters in the Green Bay suburb of Allouez. Linda Wallenfang, a 64-year-old former union worker at Georgia-Pacific who is now retired, invited Welch into her living room and sat on the sofa. When the subject of abortion came up, Wallenfang said she had concerns about the issue but believed it was none of the government’s business. She told of the shame her late mother felt after having two abortions in the 1950s, the first as a teenager and the second when she already had two young children and felt overwhelmed. “My mother went to her grave thinking she was a murderer. We told her God had forgiven her,” Wallenfang said. When people hear stories about “what happens to real women,” she added, “it changes their perspective.”
