Women tell stories of their abortions for Idaho’s Pro-Voice Project

Abortion is illegal in Idaho, which borders Oregon to the east. For years leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade, women’s health advocates warned that maternal care and abortion services were part of an intrinsically woven set of OB/GYN care that women’s health depended on. Now that Idaho has outlawed abortion – the state’s ban is among the most restrictive in the nation – residents are living out what advocates predicted. Some women who want to have children can now no longer get maternal care where they live, and some have suffered complications during pregnancies they desperately wanted to take to term but could not, because of their own health or fetal anomalies.

Jen Jackson Quintano lives in North Idaho with her husband and two children and runs a tree service business. She began a storytelling effort she calls the Pro-Voice Project, for women to tell their own stories about accessing – or not being able to access – reproductive health services. The project has held live performances mostly around Idaho for women to tell their own stories at the microphone. In some cases when they haven’t felt comfortable speaking publicly themselves, their stories are performed by actors.

Desi Ballis and her husband lost their third child, Tucker, a year ago, in the second trimester when the couple discovered he had a fatal condition. Ballis, who lives in Haley, Idaho, was at risk of life-threatening complications before she made it to Utah to have a medically necessary abortion. In Idaho, she would not have been able to get that care until she was actively dying.

Ballis and Quintano join us to share their personal experiences and what they hope to achieve by sharing some of the most painful experiences of their lives. Members of the Pro-Voice Project will be in Portland Saturday, March 1 for an event that highlights women’s stories Idaho and in Oregon, where women face no state restrictions on abortion, but some still struggle with other barriers to access.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion in its Dobbs decision, Idaho enacted one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. It’s meant that some women who want to have children can no longer get maternal care where they live. Others have suffered complications during pregnancies they desperately wanted to take to term, but couldn’t because of their own health or fetal anomalies. That’s in addition to women who want to terminate their pregnancies but can’t do so in their home state. Jen Jackson Quintano lives in North Idaho. She started the project with a simple idea that there is power and value in hearing all of these stories. She calls her effort the Pro Voice Project. She joins us now along with Desi Ballis, a mother and educator who has told her own story as part of this project. Welcome to you both.

Jen Jackson Quintano: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Jen, first, what made you decide to start Pro Voice?

Jackson Quintano: It was really, it was related to the Dobbs decision, of course. I think a lot of us were impacted by that. I just felt an enormous amount of anger when that decision came down and I think a lot of times beneath anger, we find that there’s grief. And that was certainly the case for me thinking about my past experiences with not having a say over my body and decisions around my body and my sexuality, and just the thought of that sort of cultural experience now being the law of the land. It was too much and I felt like I just needed to do something. And stories are the best way I know to advocate for issues, to reach people, to connect, to build empathy. So I just started collecting stories and it’s really expanded from there.

Miller: As I mentioned, Desi is one of the women whose stories you have collected, as you say. Desi, my understanding is that you and your husband had two kids already when you got pregnant in 2023. As you said in a video that Jen produced, you were thrilled, you’ve been trying for a while, for a third. How far along were you in that pregnancy when you learned that there was some kind of problem?

Desi Ballis: Yeah, so I actually got pregnant in February of, I was pregnant in February of 24, so it was just this past year and I was around 20 weeks. I went for my anatomy scan, and that was when we had found out that our son, Tucker, was really sick. And so by the time we had fled the state and got the care that we needed, I was 21 weeks.

Miller: Before you, as you say, fled the state, what did your doctor in Idaho tell you and as importantly, I suppose, what didn’t he tell you?

Ballis: It was a really nuanced conversation. He just continued to tell me that it was so important that I got to Utah. He had already contacted doctors there for me and they were going to be calling me within minutes to follow up. What I was not told was that I needed an abortion. I just kept having this emphasis that I needed to get out of state and that my baby was very sick. And then right before I left was just this really firm kind of redirective, like, I need you to really understand your baby is not going to survive. Because it went from trying to fix the situation to then, how do we then take this on?

Miller: What might have happened if you had simply stayed in Idaho?

Ballis: Well, I guess the reality is that I might not be here today, because doctors are so fearful to act, and they don’t know when to act, based on the current legislation. I would have had to have been significantly far along in either sepsis or losing blood, or any other kind of infection before doctors could legally act to support me and help me.

Miller: Was your doctor able to even say that to you, that if you don’t go and have an abortion in a state where you can, you might die in our state? Could he say that?

Ballis: No, not at all. In fact, I think that was his driving force for just being so firm. He grabbed my hands and just told me multiple times and looked me dead in the eye and just kept saying over and over and over again, “I need you to get to Salt Lake. I need you to get there. Do you understand this? This is very serious. I need you to get to Salt Lake.” And of course I didn’t know at the time what I truly needed. I thought it was strange, but I was listening to my doctor with full trust.

Miller: What happened when you got to Salt Lake?

Ballis: Yeah, so once I got to Salt Lake, I had a full team waiting for me, which was wonderful. We went through a myriad of additional tests and screenings, and everything had kind of confirmed what we had learned in Idaho, with this added piece that now my son had progressed rapidly just in this 24 hour period. And because I have Idaho-based insurance, I was not able to get care in the hospital. And so we were weighing financial options of $20,000 to $30,000 to stay in a hospital, going to different clinics, finding a clinic that could even get us in, weighing all of our options: do we wait, do we act fast? How sick am I going to get? How quickly am I going to get sick? It was just this very fast tracked myriad of impossible decisions.

Miller: How did you decide to tell your story?

Ballis: I feel like the first couple of months, I really couldn’t even put into words what had happened to me. And I just remember thinking this is such an injustice and also how naive of me as a woman, when you hear abortion laws and you hear, oh, there’s exceptions for the health of the mother, you think that of course, if I need this, I can get it, and I was so ignorant. And I just thought to myself, how many other women out there just don’t know and could potentially endure what we went through? And then it just shifted my whole perspective of I can’t just let my son pass and have gone through this without speaking out and now making this my mission to make sure it doesn’t happen to others.

Miller: Jen, what has it been like to get women in Idaho to tell their stories about seeking abortions?

Jackson Quintano: Oh gosh, it’s, it’s difficult. I mean, on so many levels. This is not something that we are accustomed to talking about, as is the case with a lot of things related to reproductive health care. We don’t often talk about miscarriages. We don’t talk about abortions. We are, there’s a lot of shame around this, or stigma, so there’s trying to get beyond that barrier. And also there’s the fact that people in Idaho are quite fearful when it comes to speaking up, just in general, but especially with issues like abortion. There is a concern like, oh, if I talk about this, could there be legal consequences for me? Could I get in trouble? There’s that, there’s also the sense of, if I speak up and share that I had an abortion, what will happen to me? Will there be threats to me, verbally, physically? Will my community ostracize me? What will happen? There is a lot of fear in the state around these sorts of things, and we just, we don’t know what to expect when we speak up.

So it’s been a lot of working through fear and working through shame to just get people to feel comfortable saying the word abortion and then moving into storytelling about it. And one thing that’s been really helpful is the bravery of people like Desi. I mean, my heart is full of so much gratitude to her and others like her who are brave and coming forward with their stories because then it creates a safe space for other people to do the same. Bravery begets bravery. So the more stories we collect and we share, the easier it is to have this conversation.

Miller: Desi, did you have those fears that Jen has just outlined?

Ballis: Oh, absolutely. I would say I still do. Yeah, I identify as a Christian woman. We live in a very, very small town. My husband is an elected official. I mean, we have every microscope possible on us and our family. And I still feel like that gives me even more of a responsibility to speak out and share this truth and this reality that so many women are going through these days. I just feel this real strong responsibility with that, regardless of the fear and that is very real.

Miller: Have you gotten pushback from people in your life, or strangers, since you started telling your story?

Ballis: It’s been overwhelmingly positive, but of course those negatives sit in the back of your mind and replay, especially coming from a Christian world. There’s a lot of opinions on abortion. And yeah, some of the responses have just been downright cruel and just awful.

Miller: Would you have described yourself as pro-life before you went through this?

Ballis: Not necessarily. I truly believe that as a Christian, it is not my place to push my beliefs on anyone else. My only calling as a Christian is to love others and love on them. And God gave us free will. And I would say that I never was pro-life or pro-choice. I just felt the need that women, in their own space and in their own world, should have the right to decide. And I never really thought of the nuances of medical complications and fatal fetal anomalies, of course as much as I know now, unfortunately, but yeah, I was not a hard line on that like most Christians are.

Miller: The Pro Voice project is gonna be taking part in an event at the First Unitarian Church of Portland this Saturday at 3 p.m.

Jen, how much do you see your effort now as a response, not just to the overturning of Roe and the changes in state laws around the country that have followed, but changes in response to the way that abortion had been talked about in the decades that preceded that Supreme Court case? I guess I’m wondering how much you want stories about abortion themselves to change in the public consciousness.

Jackson Quintano: Yeah, that’s a great question. I look back at the era where Roe was the law of the land, and we didn’t talk about abortion when it was illegal. As I mentioned before, that resided in the realm of shame, stigma, silence. It was something that a lot of people availed themselves of, but they didn’t feel comfortable sharing that fact with others in their life. And the rights that you’re not talking about, you’re not fighting for, and those rights tend to slip away. And I think we didn’t do ourselves any favors in not talking about the place that abortion has held in our individual lives, and within the realm of medicine too. We just, we’ve sort of siloed it from the rest of the reproductive health care experience.

And so, of course, I would like to see a change in the laws as soon as possible, but I also see the work that I’m doing as like the slow cultural change to bring these stories into the public consciousness. To elevate these stories, to expand the narrative, so it isn’t just this black and white, this binary, without any nuance. I want there to be a lot of nuance in this conversation and just understanding for all the reasons why someone might need abortion care and to normalize use of the word, to normalize its discussion, because it is a very important part of healthcare, as we heard from Desi’s story. Let’s hope we can change some of these laws soon and turn this ship around, but also let’s do the work on the ground as a culture to create more space for this experience that so many of us need to seek out.

Miller: Who do you most want to reach with the events that you put on or the videos that you produce?

Jackson Quintano: So recently I held an event in a small community south of Sand Point where I live, and we had about 30 people show up for it. It was a screening of some of our short documentary films. One of the films is about Desi and her experience, and the room was a mix of people, but there were a large number of people there who considered themselves pro-life. And that was really powerful to be able to share space with people on both sides of this issue, to have them hear stories from the mouths of people who have been impacted by these laws and then to have a conversation about it face to face. When you’re looking into someone’s eyes, it’s a lot harder to bring vitriol to the conversation, or participate in name calling and so we were able to have a very lovely nuanced conversation about the abortion experience.

And people in the room were willing to say, I consider myself pro-life, and I don’t want to impose my views on someone else. The stories I saw today were tragic. I wouldn’t want someone to have to go through that. Or someone can say, I’m pro-life, and more than that, I don’t want government reaching into anyone’s healthcare decisions. And so it was nice to have a room full of people who could hold both experiences and talk about it with one another, and disagree with one another, but at the end of the night, be able to hug before departing. And so that right there feels like a real win to me, to be able to enter those spaces.

Also, that said, I don’t want to dismiss what we call preaching to the choir. We tend to denigrate that is like less than, but especially here in Idaho, it is so important to rally those who do support abortion rights and help them feel like they’re not alone in that, that it’s OK to speak up about that, that they have safety in numbers, we’ve got their back. And engage them in this fight, so they can overcome their fear to fight for this.

Miller: Desi, what do you most want people to know about the full repercussions of Idaho’s abortion ban?

Ballis: Yeah, I feel like my big ‒ and this really has just been evolving over the last year as I go through this journey ‒ it’s just this idea that fatal fetal anomalies and the need for life saving healthcare doesn’t discriminate. They don’t care if you’re pro-choice, pro-life, what political side you land on, Christian, atheists, wherever you fall within your faith, even. These things don’t discriminate, and the need for health saving life care is critical, and you cannot legislate every nuance of pregnancy. It is such a complicated thing and imposing your belief system on someone else that restricts them from life, their own life. I just want to bring that perspective forward, and help people see it from another view.

Miller: Desi and Jen, thanks very much.

Ballis: Thank you.

Jackson Quintano: Thank you for having us.

Miller: Desi Ballis is one of the women who has participated in the Pro Voice Project, which encourages women to tell their stories about accessing healthcare after Idaho’s abortion ban was enacted. It was started by Jen Jackson Quintano.

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