Two Minnesota natives, high-profile national activists, aim to shift fraught abortion debate

A woman walked into a bar in St. Paul, looking for her old friend. Lizz Winstead — a comedian, co-creator of “The Daily Show” and founder of the Abortion Access Front that uses humor to destigmatize abortion — ordered a beer. “I like terrible beer,” Winstead said, getting a two-for-one deal on Hamm’s. “Never ask me about beer.”

“Hi, friend!” said Amy Hagstrom Miller, the founder, president and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, which provides abortion care at six brick-and-mortar clinics, including in Bloomington, and virtual care in five states. “I don’t want a Hamm’s.”

Hagstrom Miller settled on Summit Extra Pale Ale and soon the two were laughing, finishing each other’s sentences, and riffing on a frequent topic of conversation: the importance of speaking plainly, honestly and, yes, humorously about something that for decades often was only whispered about behind closed doors.

Destigmatizing abortion is a shared goal for these two prominent abortion rights activists, both Minnesota natives who have risen to the front ranks of the legal abortion movement. That kind of frank talk around a once-taboo topic reflects a new strategy for Democrats in an election where they hope to move votes over concern for dwindling access to abortion.

“Until fairly recently, the only acceptable way to talk about abortion in the public culture was through a framework of regret,” Hagstrom Miller said. “Now we’re seeing more aspirational stories: ‘Because of abortion, I was able to do X.’”

The abortion debate was upended two years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Since then, 14 states have banned the procedure. Yet public support for legal abortion has inched upward; nearly two in three Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Democrats see abortion as a winning electoral issue, with voters repeatedly indicating support for abortion rights and with conservative states like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio explicitly voting for abortion rights since the Dobbs decision.

While President Joe Biden framed his views around vague themes like “bodily autonomy” and “reproductive freedom,” he was reluctant to use the word “abortion.” The new Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, speaks more frankly about abortion.

It’s an approach Winstead and Hagstrom Miller have advocated for decades.

They met more than a decade ago, when Hagstrom Miller saw Winstead’s comedy show during a National Abortion Federation conference. The Minnesota expats — Winstead a graduate of Minneapolis’ Southwest High School now living in Brooklyn, Hagstrom Miller a graduate of Stillwater High School now living in Virginia — vibed immediately over a love of Prince and The Replacements and a shared philosophy on an issue that has long galvanized national politics.

The women want our culture to view abortion not as a necessary evil but as a normal part of women’s health care. Winstead has invited Hagstrom Miller on stage at dozens of comedy shows raising funds for Abortion Access Front; Winstead gets laughs, and Hagstrom Miller tells serious stories from clinics. Winstead has introduced Hagstrom Miller to celebrities and visited employees at Whole Woman’s Health sites, helping plant bushes to shield patients from protesters. The two, joined by Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, led media on a tour of the Bloomington clinic this summer to demystify what happens behind clinic doors.

“We want to shift the language from a framework of judgment and regret to a framework of love and freedom,” Hagstrom Miller said.

Hagstrom Miller used to live in Texas. Her organizations — the clinics as well as a nonprofit, Whole Woman’s Health Alliance — were part of two landmark U.S. Supreme Court abortion decisions. She won the first, Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, in 2016, which ruled Texas created an undue burden for women seeking an abortion. She lost the second, Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, in 2021, when a more conservative Supreme Court affirmed the Texas Heartbeat Act, which outlawed abortion at six weeks and allowed a private citizen to file a civil suit against anyone performing, aiding or abetting an abortion after the six-week threshold.

As an activist and plaintiff, Hagstrom Miller must be serious and professional. She can’t mock, say, elected officials who call pregnant women “hosts.” So she feeds stories to Winstead.

“She can mock the bad guys in ways that I can’t,” Hagstrom Miller said. “We want people to have a trusted medical environment. But there are some things that are absurd, insane, that I deal with on a daily basis. She can tell a story that’s not only funny, but shows that it’s insane, it’s nuts.”

And Winstead can do things like dance around in an abortion-pill costume at the Democratic National Convention to raise awareness about misinformation about medication abortion.

They came to the fight from different places.

Winstead was raised in a conservative Catholic home thinking that birth control was a sin. At 16, she got pregnant the first time she had sex with her physically abusive boyfriend.

“I didn’t know how to get out of that relationship, but I did know I’d never get out of it if I remained pregnant and had a kid with this person,” she said. “I was driven by my own survival.”

The first time she told her abortion story on television was in 1992, on a Comedy Center show called “Women Allowed.” It felt freeing. Abortion-related comedy led her to start Lady Parts Justice League, later renamed Abortion Access Front.

“How do you fight for something if you can’t say it?” Winstead said.

Hagstrom Miller was raised in a social-justice focused Presbyterian family. She saw at a young age how unplanned pregnancies can wreck lives, but she also saw harsh judgment and criticism of women who continued pregnancies: “If you’re told abortion is wrong and you continue the pregnancy, why wouldn’t there be a heroic narrative there instead of this shame narrative?”

She studied abroad in India and saw a place where women had few rights. That spurred her toward activism. She got a job at Planned Parenthood and later worked in clinics in New York, Texas and Virginia, doing everything from administering ultrasounds to assisting with surgeries to working in management.

She experienced infertility and adopted two children. She saw similar shame and stigma with infertility: “There’s identity issues: Who are you as a woman, who are you as a mother, who are you as a family?”

The women relish when they’re in Minnesota together, where each still has a place. A few days before grabbing beers, cheese curds and walleye at the St. Paul pub, Winstead headed to Hagstrom Miller’s cabin. They went mushroom hunting.

Both frame abortion access as an issue of patriarchy suppressing women’s equality. Both see the issue filled with nuance, not one neatly divided along red and blue lines. And both love talking, publicly and unapologetically, about a topic even Democrats following Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” framework have been skittish about for so long.

“It’s not only Democrats in my waiting room — Republicans have abortions all the time,” Hagstrom Miller said. “Because it’s actually not a partisan issue. It’s super, super personal for people. The same person who is delighted about a pregnancy at one point in their life might not be later.”

“There are stories counselors tell you of patients who come in with very strong religious conflict,” Winstead said. “They’ve been told things like if they have an abortion, they’ll take my whole uterus out. And they go anyway. It’s rare to talk somebody out of an abortion because, it turns out, women are competent.”

Hagstrom Miller said she has never seen the complexity of the abortion decision reflected in its politics.

“I’ve always been drawn to that complexity, where someone examines their hopes and dreams for the future, their plans for a family, the religious background they come from and the family values they inherited, and they really choose a course for themselves,” she said. ”That’s one of the cool things about the abortion decision. It’s one of the few times people actively decide what happens next in their lives instead of letting their lives happen to them.”