Before receiving abortion care, Allison Bierman, 31, of Iowa City, did not consider herself to be politically active. If someone had asked her if she would be speaking at public forums and appearing in Congressional candidate’s ad campaigns, she said she would have laughed in their face.

However, Bierman is now speaking out about her experience requiring an abortion for an ectopic pregnancy, which means the baby was growing outside of the uterus.

Featured in an ad for Iowa’s 1st Congressional District candidate and Democrat Christina Bohannan, Bierman is encouraging voters to cast their ballots for Bohannan, whose campaign centers on reproductive rights and access to abortion.

Bierman said Iowa’s recent six-week abortion ban catalyzed many people, including herself, to become politically active and advocate for reproductive freedom. The ban, enacted on July 29, bars almost all abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected.

Local artist Kymbyrly Koester does not consider herself to be an activist. Instead, she uses art as a medium to express her pro-abortion rights stance. She helped facilitate a visit from the BodyFreedom for Every(Body) truck, a cross-country art exhibition tour advocating for abortion rights, in Iowa City on Sept. 18.

Sitting barefoot in her garden at Public Space One, Koester spoke about her experience receiving an abortion at the Emma Goldman Clinic in Iowa City when she was 23 years old. Koester said Iowa’s abortion ban both saddens and enrages her.

“It breaks my heart if I let it because it should not even be a conversation,” Koester said. “It’s a medical procedure. Everybody, everybody has the right to medical procedures.”

Koester uses art to create space for joy and says holding spaces against the horribleness of hateful legislation is important.

“There’s no excuse, really, to be quiet in this day and age,” Koester said.

Encouraging people to take up space and speak out for their rights, Koester said it is important to vote in both local and national elections, and voters must take the time and energy to read up on candidates’ stances.

With similar and more restrictive abortion bans enacted in 21 states, the upcoming 2024 general election marks the first presidential election in which abortion is on the ballot since the overturning of Roe v. Wade two years prior.

Candidates from the top to the bottom of the ballot have put abortion at the forefront of the upcoming election.

Democrats advocate for abortion rights and push to overturn bans restricting access. Bohannan, running against incumbent U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, has placed reproductive rights at the center of her campaign. Vice President Kamala Harris has done the same in her bid for the White House, using the issue as a platform for her campaign.

Republicans running for office, such as former President Donald Trump, take varying stances on the issue, with some calling for a national abortion ban and others supporting abortion bans with exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the Mother. Others suggest the issue should be left to the states to decide.

Political messaging from both parties centers around key issues for voters. In this election cycle, abortion is top-of-mind for a large swath of voters.

Reproductive rights and abortion access are top issues for voters in Iowa and across the nation. A September 2024 Pew Research Center survey found that 51 percent of voters feel abortion is an important issue when considering who to vote for in the 2024 election.

A candidate’s stance on the issue is likely to determine whether or not a voter casts a ballot in
their favor.

Campaigning on abortion

Megan Goldberg, Cornell College political science professor, said Democratic campaigns are focusing on stories of real women who have required abortion care or have been negatively impacted by restrictive abortion policies, such as Bohannan’s ad featuring Bierman.

Goldberg said this tactic is emotionally appealing to voters and helps show the magnitude of the issue to voters, and Democrats are most effective when they use real stories and real people impacted by
the issue.

“It’s one thing for a candidate to come and say there’s a lot of gray area, let me get into the technicalities and the medical terms,” she said. “Frankly, even if it’s a really high-stakes issue when it’s technical, it’s often boring. It’s much more effective to relay information — and this comes from cognitive psychology — to do it in a narrative form, and to illustrate this with a narrative.”

Vice President Kamala Harris has been the White House’s public face for efforts to ensure abortion access and improve maternal health care. In March, she became the highest-ranking U.S. official to make a public visit to an abortion clinic.

Her messaging on abortion has highlighted the stories of those impacted by the abortion ban. At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia — a swing state — she referenced reporting from ProPublica about two Georgia women whose deaths were deemed preventable by maternal health care experts, who blamed the state’s abortion ban.

Republicans have struggled to navigate how to campaign on abortion.

“Trying to sort of stage out where they actually are on this issue is really tricky for them sometimes,” Goldberg said. “We saw that there are several candidates right now trying to walk back where the party stands.”

Despite deeming himself the “most pro-life president in history,”  Trump has waffled on abortion policy over the years. Trump cemented the conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority which overturned Roe v. Wade.

His latest position is that abortion policies should be decided by the states.

Republican vice president candidate Ohio Sen. JD Vance called for a national abortion ban in 2022. However, in an Oct. 1 debate against Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, he echoed Trump’s stance that abortion should be decided by states.

Goldberg said abortion was not always a polarizing issue as we see it today. Goldberg said before the Roe v. Wade decision, neither party had staked out their contrasting positions on abortion.

Goldberg said in the 2016 election, abortion was top-of-mind for certain types of voters, especially religious political groups, but it is now a much more important issue to voters because state and national lawmakers can now enact legislation and policy about abortion.

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“When you’re voting for a legislator, there is a good chance that they’ll be voting on some sort of reproductive rights concerning abortion, and that wasn’t really the case before,” she said.

Goldberg said the abortion debate that people are familiar with now is very divisive and deeply tied to religion.

“This is one of those issues that they start to become active on as part of an overarching ideology about what family life should look like in the U.S.,” Goldberg said.

Abortion issue spurs endorsements, activism

Reproductive health care and abortion access are critical issues for voters in Iowa politics and across the nation, following restrictive abortion bans such as the Hawkeye state’s recent six-week abortion ban.

A recent Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll found 64 percent of Iowans think abortion should be legal in all or most cases.

Nationally, voters largely support abortion access. According to Gallup’s May 2024 poll on Americans’ abortion views, 51 percent of U.S. adults favor expansive abortion rights, wanting abortion to be legal in all or most cases.

Organizations on either side of the abortion issue support candidates who back their views.

In Iowa, both pro- and anti-abortion rights groups support candidates who align with their views on the issue.

Pulse Life Advocates, an Iowa pro-life group, does not endorse candidates but is working to educate Iowans on how candidates stand on the issue of abortion.

Maggie DeWitte, executive director of Pulse Life Advocates, said the organization has been stressing the importance of the upcoming election via its website, blogs, and social media posts. The material highlights the positions of national and state candidates.

“We’re working very vigorously to make sure that Iowans are aware of where candidates stand on the life issue, and if they are in support of restricting abortion, if they’re in support of protecting moms and babies from the harm of abortion,” DeWitte said. “We want people to be educated on that and understand what their positions are regarding the life issue.”

DeWitte and her organization are laying the groundwork with Iowa legislators to bring forward a Life at Conception Act next legislative session.

Planned Parenthood Advocates of Iowa PAC is investing a quarter million dollars into this election, said  Mazie Stilwell, director of public affairs in Iowa for Planned Parenthood North Central States. The funds are invested directly into candidates and used to spread education about the importance of reproductive freedom.

Stilwell said the organization knows momentum for reproductive freedom is at an all-time high, and they want to capitalize on that and help voters see how their current representatives have either supported or failed them on the issue.

She said she wants Iowa’s voters to see the difference they can make on the issue.

“We’re in a time where, of course, there’s so much conversation about the presidential election, and we do have an incredible champion at the top of the ticket in Vice President Harris and Governor Walz, but what we also know is that these issues of reproductive freedom are being decided at a state level,” Stilwell said.

Abortion in Iowa’s closest race

Races in two of Iowa’s Congressional districts tighten, with Democratic candidates capitalizing on their Republican opponents’ wavering and unpopular stances on abortion.

The 1st and 3rd District U.S. House races in Iowa are now considered true “tossups,” according to an Oct. 5 Cook Political Report, an organization of nonpartisan elections analysts.

A September Des Moines Register/Mediacom poll found Democrats are favored in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District by three points, well within the poll’s margin of error. The poll marks the first time during the 2024 election cycle that polling showed favor for a Democrat over a Republican in an Iowa Congressional District.

Stilwell said voter turnout for reproductive freedom is especially important in these local elections because legislative seats have come to just six votes in past elections.

Miller-Meeks, running for reelection in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, first won her seat in Congress against former Iowa state senator and current Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart in 2020 by just six votes. She won reelection against Bohannan in 2022 by seven percentage points.

“We know that these come down to just a handful of votes,” Stilwell said. “So when voters are feeling like their vote doesn’t make a difference, or nobody cares what I really think about these issues, or my one vote isn’t going to tip the balance of power here, my one vote is not going to go far. It’s so important for us to be able to get that message across.”

Bierman said if people want to see an immediate change in Iowa regarding reproductive health care, they need to focus on local and state government and ensure the state has elected officials who reflect what the people want.

Electing pro-choice candidates like Bohannan to Iowa’s legislature won’t reinstate Roe v. Wade, Bierman said, but it will go a long way in the state government of overturning Iowa’s abortion ban. She said electing just a Democratic president will not trickle down to make these changes in local government.

“I really hope people are focusing as much on their local elections as they are the national one as well, because it’s equally, if not more important right now,” Bierman said.