It was one of the opening night’s most dramatic and sober moments. Three women emerged on the main stage, each in a spotlight against the darkness.
Amanda Zurawski, standing beside her husband, told of how she nearly died when her baby would not survive and she could not get abortion care in Texas. Kaitlyn Joshua spoke of bleeding, miscarrying and being turned away from two emergency rooms in Louisiana. And Hadley Duvall of Kentucky told a harrowing story of being impregnated by her stepfather at age 12.
“He calls it ‘a beautiful thing,’” she said, quoting former President Donald J. Trump’s praise for states that have enacted strict abortion bans. “What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”
Audible gasps punctured the silence of the arena. Women wiped away tears. Next to her husband, Gwen Walz shook her head in apparent horror, trying to take it all in. And when the testimonies were finished, the arena rose to its feet in support.
Such a scene was unimaginable at the Democratic National Convention just four years ago, when the word “abortion” was never mentioned on the main stage. Then, it was Republicans who embraced the issue at their party convention, awarding key speaking slots to anti-abortion activists and boasting of their “pro-life” bona fides.
But in the first presidential election without the foundation of Roe in half a century, the political scripts have been inverted. The decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, is one of Mr. Trump’s signature accomplishments — he appointed the three Supreme Court justices whose votes proved decisive. Detailed calls for federal limits on abortion have been a central plank of the Republican Party for decades.
But the issue barely came up at the party’s convention last month in Milwaukee, a tacit acknowledgment of the political peril now facing Republicans at every level as voters have responded in anger to America’s new reality.
Democrats, meanwhile, are embracing the issue in a manner unlike ever before. Long gone are the Clinton-era calls to keep the procedure “safe, legal and rare.” With Roe overturned, they have framed support for abortion rights not only as a fundamental freedom for women but also as a moral call, one that is central to American families and gender equity.
The convention spotlight, abortion rights activists said, reflects how the political tides have turned, and the extent to which Democrats hope the issue will help fuel them in November.
“That is a huge, big difference from a party that was uncomfortable even saying the word ‘abortion’ a decade ago,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly NARAL. “How we got here is terrible. We got here because of Dobbs, and the horror and the crisis we are in. But now that we are here, we have a moral obligation to take advantage of it, to maximize wins and to rectify the situation.”
More abortion rights-related programming is expected at the convention in the coming days, with speeches from the leaders of abortion rights organizations including Planned Parenthood, Reproductive Freedom for All and EMILY’s List, the political organization dedicated to electing Democrats who back abortion rights.
On Monday, the speakers focused heavily on the promise that Vice President Kamala Harris has made central to her campaign: codifying the protections once guaranteed by Roe into federal law.
“Kamala Harris will sign a national law to restore the right to an abortion,” Ms. Duvall said. “She will fight for every woman and every girl.”
But that may be a difficult pledge to keep in the short term, given that Democrats are unlikely to have the necessary support in the Senate to pass such legislation.
Even among Democrats, it remains unclear exactly what “codifying Roe” would mean.
Collectively, abortion rights groups talk about Roe as “the floor” — a starting point for expansion of access to the procedure, and for discussion of broader structures that need to change so that women have real choices about their reproductive lives beyond the issue of abortion. Roe set up a trimester-based system to determine abortion regulation, and protected a woman’s right to end a pregnancy before a fetus was viable, or able to survive outside a woman’s body.
“Solutions in 2024 do not lie in 1973,” said Nourbese Flint, the president of All Above All and its action arm, a reproductive rights group that focuses on justice and voters of color. “It is an incredible time to rebuild abortion access that wasn’t just the floor, but actually really looks at all the ways in which folks were left out of the systems.”
It is unlikely that moderates from both parties will support such an expansive approach. Legislation introduced shortly before the Supreme Court decision failed to garner a simple majority, after more moderate Senators who support abortion rights said it took a far too sweeping approach.
But the abortion rights movement is trying to think on a longer timeline, with Ms. Harris as a new beginning. In June, a coalition of groups announced a national, 10-year campaign to prepare legislation for Democrats and build support for those policies among the public and on Capitol Hill.
While no decisions have been made, movement leaders are shifting away from Roe’s framework altogether.
Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, is helping to lead an effort arguing for a broader reframing of how the Democratic Party thinks about abortion policy. It requires analyzing abortion access through perspectives on race, gender, and economic disparity, and linking intersectional issues, she said.
“We created a framework that did not take into consideration the experience of pregnancy and how people make decisions, a framework that was not grounded in equality and bodily autonomy,” Ms. McGill Johnson said of Roe. Now, she said, “we are starting with a value proposition of trusting doctors and providers.”
Their goals now include ending the Hyde Amendment, a longstanding measure that prohibits the use of federal funds for most abortions; protecting a right to contraception, to I.V.F., to emergency abortion care and to travel to get an abortion; making abortion affordable, for citizens and immigrants; and ultimately securing a federal right to abortion, though the details of what that precisely means are not clear.
This is a moment “to reimagine the right,” Ms. McGill Johnson said.
That right, at least, has become a rallying cry, if not a concrete policy. On Monday evening, speaker after speaker underscored abortion rights.
President Biden spoke of the issue in the language of an older political era, describing the need to restore “choice” for women and promising that Ms. Harris would “restore” Roe v. Wade.
Hillary Clinton, whose fight for abortion rights and access was a central cause of her political life, passed that mission on to Ms. Harris, casting her as part of a line of female leaders stretching back to the early suffragists.
“She will restore abortion rights nationwide,” promised Mrs. Clinton, as the crowd exploded in cheers.
But many others used the messaging Democrats have widely adopted in the post-Roe era, casting abortion as a fundamental freedom — one that Republicans have ended as their allies seek to undermine others, like in some cases, access to I.V.F.
Josh Zurawski, the husband of Amanda, spoke directly to other men. Abortion “isn’t just a woman’s fight,” he said. “This is about fighting for our families.”
Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky, whose support of abortion rights helped him win re-election, said abortion bans without exceptions for rape, incest and nonviable pregnancies failed “any test of humanity, any test of basic decency.”
Amid the new energy is the reality of how far Democrats have to go to achieve their goals. The three women who spoke on Monday are from states that ban abortion almost entirely — Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky. Women in such states face a radically different future, even if Ms. Harris is elected.
In Alabama, Robin Marty is the executive director of WAWC Healthcare, which was a main provider of abortion in the state until Roe was overturned and the procedure became illegal. “If you want to know what the next Trump administration will look like, you can see it, because that is what is already happening here,” she said. “We are Project 2025.”
Now, her center offers some pregnancy and contraceptive services and S.T.I. treatment. But she expects it will have to downsize or close completely in the next couple of months, because of a lack of funding and medical providers.
She hopes a Harris presidency will be able to review federal funding for family planning and health services to allocate more money to assist groups like hers. But even if Democrats win at the national level, she worries about a future where states like Alabama will try to opt out of Harris administration policies, resulting in legal battles and little change for the women she sees, she said.
“Everything is meaningless. It does not matter what is happening at a federal level,” she said. “It’s difficult to see it being any different regardless of who is in the White House.”