In North Carolina, the future of abortion could come down to a few hundred votes

HUNTERSVILLE, NC — Beth Helfrich had locked herself in the bathroom to watch the legislature vote. It was the only room in the house where the mother of five would be able to hear anything.

It was late one night in May 2023, and North Carolina lawmakers were voting on whether to institute a 12-week abortion ban, which would override the veto of their Democratic governor. Helfrich couldn't stop watching — and hoping. She'd spent the past several weeks begging neighbors and friends to call their Republican state representative, at one point making phone calls from the school bus while chaperoning a field trip. All they needed was one person to break ranks.

The stakes felt tangible. Helfrich had experienced two miscarriages. For each, she had been given the option of medical management, including a dilation and curettage procedure, which is also used for abortions. In the wake of state bans, dilation and cutterage has become harder to obtain.

"That's part of why it feels so personal," she said. "Yes, I have chosen to have five children and I have always had the autonomy and fundamental right to make decisions about my care every step of the way."

That night, she watched as one by one, the state's GOP lawmakers, including her own representative, voted in favor of the 12-week ban.

"It was a moment of such powerlessness and feeling ignored, and I don't think it was that we weren't heard," she said. "It was that we were heard, and it didn't matter."

The next day, Helfrich, who had never run for office beyond her college's student government and the parent-teacher association at her children's school (she was president), called her state Democratic party. That October, she became a candidate for the North Carolina House of Representatives.

She's part of a growing Democratic effort to turn North Carolina's Republican-dominated statehouse just a tinge more purple — one that has gotten a jolt of energy from Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris' campaign. The vice president has made repeated visits to the state, campaigning alongside popular Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to turn North Carolina blue for the first time since Barack Obama's landslide 2008 victory. Polls suggest a tight race between Harris and former President Donald Trump, who won North Carolina in the past two elections.

Democrats hope the enthusiasm for Harris will translate into down-ballot victories. State Attorney General Josh Stein, the party's candidate for governor, is favored to win, especially after an explosive CNN story unearthing lewd, racist and antisemitic comments his Republican opponent Mark Robinson made on an internet forum. In the legislature, Republicans currently hold a one-vote supermajority — enough to override the governor's veto.

If that split remains, North Carolina is likely to enact new abortion restrictions next year. That reality is driving Democrats to work toward a modest yet consequential goal: gaining at least one seat to break the GOP supermajority, which could come down to just a few hundred votes in the right state district.

It could come down to races like Helfrich's.

Abortion has energized voters nationally, becoming a staple of Harris' stump speech. And while polling consistently shows that the economy remains voters' top issue, abortion ranks high as a concern, especially for women voters. In North Carolina, polling from the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute shows that close to two-thirds of voters think abortion should be legal in most or all cases. Stein has emphasized the issue in his gubernatorial campaign.

Further restrictions in North Carolina could have profound implications for health care access well beyond its borders. With its 12-week cutoff and just over a dozen clinics, North Carolina is one of only two states in the South to allow abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy. Some providers say a stricter ban could force them to halt services altogether. If the state passed a ban at six weeks, which is before many people know they're pregnant, it could cut their patient volume so much that they wouldn't make enough money to stay open.

"That would mean imminent failure," said Calla Halle, who operates A Preferred Women's Health Center, a network of abortion clinics with two outposts in North Carolina and two more in Georgia, where abortion is outlawed after six weeks.

Soon after North Carolina enacted the 12-week ban last year — which also mandated that patients getting abortions make two visits to a clinic, separated by 72 hours — then-House Speaker Tim Moore expressed openness to pursuing tighter restrictions in 2025, including possibly a six-week ban. (Moore is now running for Congress.)

North Carolina's 72-hour in-person waiting period has prevented the state from becoming a regional destination for abortion access, said Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College who studies abortion-seeking patterns. People from nearby Southern states are more likely to travel to Virginia, which has fewer restrictions on the procedure and is now seeing more patients from as far south as Florida. Still, a tighter North Carolina ban could further strain a fragile medical ecosystem, she said.

"If North Carolina amps up the restrictions, even more people will go past North Carolina, and North residents will leave. Virginia will become even more important," Myers said. Virginia's providers are probably ready to absorb that surge — but only to an extent, she said.

"North Carolina does seem like the big looming state to me," Myers added. "It's the one I think of when I think, 'Where could there be a big shock?'"

Helfrich has been endorsed by national abortion rights groups, including Emily's List and Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly known as NARAL. Elections analysts believe that hers is one of the seats that could flip. Her Republican opponent, Melinda Bales, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview and has been quiet about abortion on the campaign trail.

If candidates like Helfrich make inroads, abortion and reproductive rights will be a major reason why. At a voter meet-and-greet hosted in a home in Huntersville, just a few miles from Charlotte, woman after woman kept returning to the topic — one that Helfrich has emphasized in speeches and is the focus of her campaign's first issue-specific advertisement. Multiple women said the fall of Roe v. Wade has made abortion a key issue for them.

"My biggest concern is choice," Christine Somers, a local precinct chair for the Mecklenburg County Democratic Party and host of the gathering, said over wine and cookies. "They're encroaching on your choice on when you have children. They really seem to be coming after women."

Deanna Wolfe, a 58-year-old single mother of two adult children who attended the gathering, is canvassing for the first time this election, going door to door to encourage voters to turn out for Democrats up and down the ballot, including Helfrich.

She was initially scared of the prospect of knocking on people's doors. But ever since Roe's overturn, Wolfe said, she's become deeply worried about the future of abortion rights in North Carolina. Now, her fear that the state legislature could pass more restrictions outweighs any hesitation she had about asking strangers to talk about politics.

"As a single mom who has done everything for myself independently in the last 19 years, including raising two independent daughters, it's really important to me that they not be restricted. I trust them to make decisions about their own bodies," Wolfe said. "I'm incredibly concerned. I'm concerned for my daughters especially — and not just my daughters, everyone's daughter's, everyone's children. I think it's a really dangerous, dangerous time, and I think that women are going to die as a result of this."

At Halle's clinic in Charlotte, the stakes are obvious. The health center provides abortions six days a week, caring for hundreds of patients each month. Because it's so close to the state's southern border, about two-thirds of the patients it sees come from another state, traveling from South Carolina and Georgia, where abortion is illegal after six weeks of pregnancy.

The clinic's walls and doors are plastered with signs reminding patients to vote and listing registration deadlines for all three states. Discharge papers now include a sheet with voting information in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, along with a link to a voter registration website — and a warning to patients about candidates "at all levels who are aiming to take away our personal freedoms." The sheet specifically singles out Robinson, who has in the past said he supported a six-week abortion ban.

At the front desk, staff are equipped with a thick stack of voter registration forms and pre-stamped envelopes that patients can use to mail the forms. Halle said she is working on a list of North Carolina candidates from the top of the ticket down to the local level who support abortion rights, in case patients find the information useful.

"It's one seat that has to change. But also how many votes have to go to that?" Halle asked. She then sighed. "I just have to do what I can live with."

The margins are slim, and in some of the tightest races, talking about abortion requires a particular level of delicacy. In the eastern end of Huntersville, Diamond Staton-Williams, a state legislator, is one of a few Democrats fighting to hold on to her seat, which she won by 629 votes in 2022. A registered nurse, Staton-Williams spoke on the legislature floor last year about having an abortion in 2002, when she was a student and she and her husband already had two children.

"I knew that in order for my family to prosper and to continue with the opportunities we had in front of us, this was the best decision for us," Staton-Williams said at the time.

Staton-Williams' district is different this cycle, thanks to a broader Republican-led redistricting project that took effect after the 2022 election. In her previous race, the seat tilted slightly Democratic. Now, it's a redder seat, one that is Whiter and more rural, and where Trump is favored to win.

This cycle, she's campaigned alongside abortion rights advocates, including local providers and patients. Her opponent, Jonathan Almond, has been endorsed by the anti-abortion group Students for Life and openly opposes abortion rights, arguing on his campaign website, "We must do more to protect the lives of unborn children in North Carolina." Almond, who has publicly appeared alongside Robinson, also did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

Between Harris' candidacy and the abortion-related stakes, Staton-Williams has seen an increase in support, like more donations and more volunteers willing to go door-to-door. She's met people — largely women — who recognize her because of the time she shared her own experience with abortion. If Democrats do make gains in the state house, she said, it will be in large part because of abortion.

Still, Staton-Williams' district is very different from one like Helfrich's — and as a result, so is the race she's running. Abortion almost never comes up when she is talking to the voters who will determine whether she holds her seat, she said. These are voters who will likely vote for Trump but who she believes could be convinced to cross party lines at the legislative level. More often, they want to talk about housing costs or the economy. The literature her campaign leaves behind alludes to abortion, but never mentions the word, referring only to her intention to support "reproductive health care."

"We are in the Bible belt, right?" she said. That requires a level of reframing — talking less about abortion and instead alluding to it in the context of expanding access to health care.

"It's talking about care for people — like this is care for people, care for women," she said. "We care about women, we care about kids, we care about families, this is care that you need."

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