Baton Rouge’s Kaitlyn Joshua is on the road telling her post-Roe story

Kaitlyn Joshua of Baton Rouge speaks onstage during the first day of the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on Aug. 19, 2024, in Chicago. (Chip Somodevilla/)

DUMFRIES, Virginia — On a warm September Saturday, Kaitlyn Joshua stepped off the Fight for Reproductive Freedoms bus into the parking lot of an office park off a busy stretch of highway in Northern Virginia.

The assembled crowd there had come to hear her and Amanda Zurawski, two of the most visible surrogates for Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, share their stories of losing wanted pregnancies in red states that have banned abortion. They're traveling around the country to key election battlegrounds to talk about the impact of the end of federal abortion rights — and warn that former President Donald Trump's election could threaten abortion access in states like Virginia where the procedure is still legal.

Since going public with her story of experiencing a miscarriage in post-Roe v. Wade Louisiana, Joshua has become one of the most outspoken and prominent Black women advocating for abortion rights — while drawing attention to disparate maternal health outcomes for Black patients. In a recent Harris campaign TikTok video that has been viewed nearly 10 million times, Joshua says, "I'm one of the women" whose stories Harris referred to in her debate against Trump.

While Joshua is fighting an uphill battle to overturn her home state's abortion ban, she's speaking out around the country to elect Harris, a longtime advocate for abortion rights and improved Black maternal health care, in the nearer term.

"It's been amazing," Joshua told The 19th while holding her infant son, Liam. After she spoke, rallygoers came up to hug her and take pictures in front of the bus. "This date has been the most in-your-face, amazing, excited people."

Still, speaking out has come with sacrifice and reliving painful stories. And sometimes she's met with protests by people yelling anti-abortion slogans, as happened in Virginia. She's also faced resistance at home; after Joshua spoke on stage at the DNC, a top Republican elected official from her state publicly cast doubt on her story.

Joshua, who spoke to The 19th in Virginia and at the Democratic convention in Chicago, is not giving up on her home state and is still pushing for reforms to Louisiana's abortion ban. She also wants to elect progressive, pro-abortion-rights candidates in a state where some Democrats , including the state's former governor, have opposed abortion rights.

Joshua warned the crowd that Virginia, the only state in the South where abortion is still legal beyond the first trimester of pregnancy, is "not immune" to the policies of a second Trump term.

"The larger end game here is to just at least try to do the work to do away and clear up the vagueness of our law, that's something to strive for when talking about the abortion ban in our state," she told The 19th. "And obviously, when Kamala Harris is elected, that's one of the boxes that we can check."

Joshua and Zurawski come from Louisiana and Texas, deep red states whose elected leaders have been at the forefront of the anti-abortion movement and where citizens have no path to directly restore abortion access in their state constitutions.

They were joined Saturday by House Democratic Whip Rep. Katherine Clark, Rep. Jennifer McClellan of Virginia and U.S. House candidate Eugene Vindman. All stood firm, speaking at the lectern as a few anti-abortion demonstrators shouted into bullhorns from the edge of the parking lot. Moments earlier, the crowd of 50-odd attendees had broken out into chants of "USA" and "When we fight, we win" to drown out the noise.

The bus tour is both a vehicle for Harris' campaign to keep abortion front and center in its messaging — and to call on her dedicated supporters to translate their passion and enthusiasm into action.

"This bus tour is great. The rallies are great. The Zoom calls are great. But I need you to knock on doors. I need you to make phone calls and text messages," McClellan said. "Before you leave, sign up for a canvass shift. 10 people out to vote."

On the road, Joshua says she's been most heartened by the intergenerational range of support for Harris.

"It is not just inspiring, it literally keeps me and Amanda going," she said.

The September 10 debate between Trump and Harris, in which abortion took center stage , galvanized her even more.

"Even in South Louisiana, folks are having a hard time saying that [Trump] did anything but poorly," she said. "It was definitely a stark contrast between the two candidates, and no one can make excuses for that, right? So I'm pretty motivated coming out of the debate."

Many Americans heard from Joshua and Zurawski at the DNC, which centered abortion like no other Democratic convention before it . They, along with Amanda's husband, Josh Zurawski, and Hadley Duvall , a young woman from Kentucky, spoke on the first night . Kate Cox , a Texas woman who sued the state in a bid to obtain an abortion after getting a rare fetal diagnosis, helped cast Texas' votes for Harris on the second night.

Zurawski and Cox spoke to The 19th on the third day of the convention aboard the abortion rights group Free & Just's "Ride to Decide" tour bus, which had traveled nearly 9,000 miles across eight states in the lead-up to the convention.

Cox said that the women have formed a sisterhood. "For me, the greatest, just light that has come out of this is to get to have this bond," she added.

"This is a shitty club that nobody wants to be part of, but once you're in it, it's incredible," said Zurawski.

Cox, who is pregnant with her third child, said in Chicago that she'll travel and campaign for as long as she can.

Zurawski too will go wherever the campaign needs her. She said she bought tickets to Taylor Swift's Eras Tour in Indianapolis for November 2, three days before the election, before later realizing she would likely be occupied on the campaign trail. "Luckily, I was very easily able to unload them on someone else," she said.

For Joshua, being on the bus tour is a piece of the broader picture of restoring not only reproductive rights but providing better health care to Black women like her who want to start and grow their families in red states.

"I've had the honor and privilege of meeting her several times, and we've talked about this," Joshua said of Harris in Chicago. "Her ability to also bring into focus the issue around Black maternal health is so important as a woman of color herself."

Joshua has said that in 2022 , she was around 11 weeks pregnant when she experienced cramping and bleeding, telltale signs of a miscarriage. But when she sought care at two different Baton Rouge-area emergency rooms, she didn't receive care to manage the miscarriage like medication or a dilation and curettage — both of which are also used in abortions. At the first hospital, she said, the staff said they would pray for her. At the second hospital she went to the next day, she said, she was losing so much blood that a security guard put her in a wheelchair — but she was still sent home.

As The 19th was interviewing Zurawski and Cox on the Free & Just bus, Joshua got word that Louisiana's Republican attorney general, Liz Murrill, responded to her convention appearance by challenging the veracity of her story.

"Once again, the Democrats have their facts wrong," Murrill said in a statement to local news outlets and on her campaign social media account on the evening of August 19. Nothing in the law "prohibits emergency care for someone having a miscarriage or any emergency situation during pregnancy," she said. "Nothing. Hard stop. In fact, doctors are legally mandated to care for someone who has an emergent health crisis, whether that's appendicitis or a miscarriage."

Joshua said news outlets, including "60 Minutes," and the Harris campaign's vetting team have viewed her medical records.

"It literally says, 'probable miscarriage, take Tylenol,'" Joshua told The 19th in an interview in Chicago. "The point was they would not give me abortion care, which is what I needed at 11 weeks pregnant. ... I think she's missing the point here."

Both hospitals Joshua went to for care said previously that the care she received was appropriate and denied that they changed their policies in response to the state's abortion ban.

"There is nothing in Louisiana's law that prohibits doctors from helping a pregnant woman during emergency situations. And this law was passed by Democrat Governor John Bel Edwards back in 2022," Lester Duhé, a spokesperson for Murrill's office, said in a statement to The 19th.

Louisiana is the rare state where Democrats have played a significant role in banning abortion.

In 2006, lawmakers passed a strict "trigger" ban that would outlaw abortion if the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. In 2022, Democratic state Sen. Katrina Jackson introduced additional legislation imposing hefty criminal penalties on physicians who performed abortions that Edwards signed into law days before the Supreme Court's decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

But Joshua argued the current slate of Republican state officeholders and lawmakers bear responsibility for the state's maternal health crisis, fueled by the fear and confusion caused by the current abortion ban, which has narrow medical exceptions and no exceptions for rape or incest.

Murrill's predecessor in the attorney general's office, now-Gov. Jeff Landry, warned physicians in a July 2022 letter that they could face penalties and lose their medical licenses for providing abortion care. In May, Landry signed additional legislation classifying mifepristone and misoprostol, medications used in medication abortions and to manage miscarriages, as Schedule IV controlled substances . The impending law is concerning physicians who use misoprostol in emergency situations like miscarriages and postpartum hemorrhage, the Louisiana Illuminator reported.

"I honestly feel like she's embarrassed, and I think maybe it's difficult for even her to see, on a national platform, that we're getting attention as a state that doesn't provide for basic maternal health care," Joshua said. "And to know that that is the agenda of her party. I think instead of taking ownership of that, she's just trying to push it on somebody else."

After their experience, Joshua said she and her husband initially decided they would "take the high road" and try to move forward. But since the abortion ban went into effect, Louisiana lawmakers have declined to add exceptions for rape and incest or further clarify medical exceptions .

"That's what we told ourselves. And in hindsight, I felt like that was so stupid, because we should have known the legislature was never going to fix their mess," she said. "They were never going to provide better language for the law, they were going to continue this charade that the abortion law has nothing to do with maternal health care — or the lack thereof."

Joshua said Murrill's response was especially "hurtful" given how Louisiana's abortion ban has compounded long-standing maternal health disparities in the state , where Black women face adverse maternal mortality rates and pregnancy outcomes.

"Unfortunately, I know plenty of families that have lost women, particularly Black women, in their lives, due to terrible maternal health care in our state," she said. "The systemic racism that's been embedded in our health care system since slavery is still there... and instead of her taking a moment to kind of take a step back and maybe have a conversation with me about that, she instead gets defensive about a law that she's supporting, and to me that she says a lot."

Joshua doesn't want to let up the pressure on her state's leaders.

"I think what is probably frustrating for them is that this story hasn't gone away," she said. "I've been very public. We plan to bring more women this fall into the fold and tell their story. We're coalescing a group of women that have been denied care all over the state of Louisiana, and it's not going to go anywhere."