This story references child rape, abortion, and descriptions of miscarriages. Resources related to sexual assault can be found at Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network, www.rainn.org.
Before she knew what a miscarriage was, Hadley Duvall experienced one. She was 12.
Sitting on the toilet in her childhood home in Owensboro, Kentucky, and racked with a level of pain she had never felt before, Hadley watched the blood, so much blood, pour out of her body and knew it was bad. She wondered if this would be it. Maybe, she thought, she’d bleed out. She’d die right here and then she’d be free of this whole mess. That could be the best-case scenario.
Down the hall her mother slept soundly. Hadley wanted to scream to her, to cry for her. She needed her mother, in that visceral way you do when you’re in the throes of deep emotional or physical pain. But she couldn’t. If her mother woke up and saw her hunched over the toilet, experiencing something that Hadley couldn’t name but knew wasn’t just a normal period, what would she think?
Then, what if her mother woke him up? Hadley’s abuser, the man who had been raping her since she was five years old, in the night while her mother slept, who told her that she was his addiction just as her mother had struggled with substance abuse. The man who, when he had told her to take a pregnancy test a few weeks earlier and it was positive, ordered her to try to “self-induce” a period with her fingers—and when that obviously didn’t work told her to make a choice, between having an abortion or pretending that one of her middle school friends was the baby’s father. The man who was her stepfather, who had raised her since she was a toddler, and whom she called Dad.
Hadley played through the scenario in her mind. Her abuser had guns in the house. If she woke everyone up, would he see it as a threat? Would he kill them all—her mother, her older sibling, and herself—to avoid the consequences?
No, it was too risky. So Hadley sat, for hours, waiting. Finally she drew herself a bath, making the water as hot as it could go. She scrubbed her entire body to get rid of the germs, to get rid of it all. Then she went back to bed. A few days later she was back at middle school. She pretended it had never even happened. But she didn’t forget. She couldn’t forget.
Nearly a decade after Hadley’s miscarriage, a woman named Kaitlyn Joshua sat in her home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, doubled over in pain. Something wasn’t right with this pregnancy, she could feel it.
On paper Kaitlyn could not have been more different from Hadley. She was a 30-year-old married mother of a young daughter, a professional political organizer who spent her days lobbying for causes like voting rights in her home state. She and her husband, Landon, wanted this baby, had planned for it, were so excited for it.
But the day after her daughter’s fourth birthday party in September 2022, Kaitlyn began to feel sharp pain. Then she began to bleed. She was nearly 11 weeks along but hadn’t yet seen a doctor for this pregnancy. When Kaitlyn had called to make a prenatal appointment around a month in, she says, she was told that she could not be seen until 12 weeks.
Less than two months prior, in June 2022, the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision had made it possible for Louisiana to nearly totally ban abortion with extremely limited exceptions. Currently the only circumstances under which a pregnant person can get an abortion in the state is if their life is at risk, if their physical health is at serious risk, or if the fetus is not expected to survive the pregnancy. Additionally, the law has had a chilling effect that has hurt pregnancy care overall; post-Dobbs, physicians have become concerned that the new law could make them liable for treating miscarriages, which are especially common before 12 weeks. Thus they have started seeing patients only after that threshold is crossed.
Kaitlyn tried to continue working, taking meetings, but the bleeding got heavier and heavier. Finally she decided to drive herself to the emergency room. Once emergency room doctors saw how much she was bleeding, Kaitlyn thought, they would help.
She thought wrong. At the emergency room Kaitlyn got an ultrasound and learned that her baby had stopped growing weeks earlier. But the doctors wouldn’t use the word miscarriage. Even worse, they wouldn’t treat her for one. They simply told her they couldn’t help her, that she would have to deal with what was happening to her on her own back at home. But, they said, they’d be praying for her. (In response to Kaitlyn’s claims to NPR, this hospital, and the one she visited the next day, denied having changed their standard of care after the ban was enacted.)
She went home. The pain grew worse and worse. Kaitlyn began to pass huge clots. Sitting there in the bathroom, her daughter in the next room, she was gripped by fear. Even though she understood what was happening to her, she had very little information. And the pain was so bad, the blood so much. So just like Hadley, she worried: Was she dying? This felt so much worse than what she remembered from giving birth to her daughter. Was she going to bleed out, right here, next to her baby?
It was this fear that spurred her to action. She couldn’t just sit there, not when her daughter needed her to survive. The next evening she drove to another hospital, where her mother and Landon joined her. It was the same routine. She got an ultrasound, explained to the doctors about her bleeding and cramping. She asked to be treated for a miscarriage, either by being given medication to help her uterus speed things along, or a dilation and curettage (D&C) procedure to surgically remove the tissue from the uterus.
No, these new doctors said. They could not, and would not, do so. Besides, was Kaitlyn sure she had actually been pregnant? Could she have just had a cyst? Regardless, there wasn’t anything they could do for her. She should go home, they told her. If the pain was really that bad, she could take Tylenol.
With no other options, Kaitlyn went home. Eventually the bleeding stopped. She recovered. But she didn’t forget. She couldn’t forget.
Two women. Two miscarriages. Two accidental activists. Two people whose willingness to share the most intimate details of their personal trauma may help elect the first woman to the White House and restore abortion rights for all.
For many women across the country, this election is fundamentally about freedom. It’s about the fact that women in Kaitlyn and Hadley’s generation had the right to an abortion from birth (but no one else in our matriarchal lineage did; not our grandmothers, not our mothers, not our daughters)—and that we then had it taken away.
It’s about the fact that right now, because of what we lost, in multiple states in the country you can have a miscarriage and be denied care, you can be raped and be forced to give birth to your abuser’s child, or you can get pregnant with a child you simply do not want, and you can legally be made to suffer, over and over again. You can go to an emergency room after failing to pass a fetus, be denied the appropriate care, and then flatline right there, in front of physicians who could’ve saved your life had they acted sooner. Two years after Roe, it’s heartbreakingly clear. Women are struggling, we are suffering, we are dying.
Neither Hadley nor Kaitlyn, both named Glamour Women of the Year, chose this path. The greatest indignity of all may be that in order for women in America to prove that we deserve the right to make our own decisions about our own bodies, the bravest among us must stand in front of the entire world and shout their trauma. They must tell their worst moments to everyone, over and over again, in graphic detail. They must take the microphone onstage at the Democratic National Convention, as both women did in August, and announce their pain. For Kaitlyn it was sharing the reality of what had happened to her since her rights were stripped away. For Hadley it was imagining what her life could have looked like had she not had that choice that her abuser offered to her.
“I can’t imagine not having a choice, but today that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” Hadley, now 22, told the gathered crowd and the country watching at home. “He calls it a beautiful thing. What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?”
Both women are now, in many ways, full-time reproductive justice advocates. Spurred by their anger, pain, and hope, they have put their lives on pause to work toward one goal: restoring abortion rights for women in the US. Their DNC appearance was just the tip of the iceberg. Both are working as surrogates for the Harris-Walz campaign, traveling all over the country to tell their stories and meet with potential voters, trying to convince them to join the fight. They’ve appeared in national campaign ads; they speak to crowds large and small. During the fall they’ll be appearing across battleground states as part of the campaign’s Fighting for Reproductive Freedom bus tour.
It hasn’t been easy. At times it’s been really hard. The two women have juggled schedules and personal commitments, the slog of endless, constant travel, and the toll that this can take on a body. They have faced backlash from Republican politicians, friends, family, and even strangers they see out in their communities. And then, of course, there are the endless online hate comments, telling them to die, that they are baby killers, that they deserve to burn in hell.
Why put themselves through this? Well, both Hadley and Kaitlyn say, it’s ultimately not about them. It’s about correcting an injustice, about fighting for a cause that they both feel so empowered by—so deeply spurred to fight for—that sitting and doing nothing feels impossible. To rise from the person they were as they bled in their bathroom and channel that pain, that rage, to ensure no other woman or girl will have to suffer too.
When she thinks about why she does this, Kaitlyn thinks about a little girl, her daughter.
“I’m hoping in a hundred years she or her grandchildren or great-grandchildren are not dealing with anything remotely close to what we’re dealing with right now,” she says.
Hadley thinks about another little girl, her younger self.
“It’s really transformed my life,” she says of her activism. “It has allowed so many conversations to be started and had, and honestly that is so special. It is so amazing to be able to stand up on a platform and give voice to a younger me, who felt like she was always trying to scream and was never heard. And to give a voice to so many who are currently going through that.”
Kaitlyn’s life currently, like the lives of many working mothers, is a balance. After all, she’s juggling a lot. Even before all this, Kaitlyn and Landon’s world was one of schedules, of family pitching in to babysit, of arranging every day into a delicate dance so everything could get done. But then she miscarried.
After the miscarriage and the resulting trauma, Kaitlyn sunk into a low she was having trouble climbing out of. She felt depressed, bitter, enraged. She would sit around thinking about how badly she had been treated and that there were probably so many other women in Louisiana out there, right now, being traumatized in the same way. How was it right? How was it fair?
Then, a month after her miscarriage, her twin sister called her. She’s a physician, and she told Kaitlyn there was going to be a Louisiana Department of Health meeting at which members of the public could speak about the abortion ban.
“She was like, ‘You need to take your butt down there and say something,’” says Kaitlyn. “And I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’”
But her sister—lovingly, of course—wouldn’t stop nagging her about it, and finally Kaitlyn agreed. She went to the meeting, where she told her story publicly for the first time.
“I talked about how I love this state, but the state doesn’t love me back,” she says. For a woman whose Louisiana roots run deep, whose own daughter was growing up among her big extended family on both sides in Baton Rouge just as Kaitlyn herself had, that realization had felt painful and profound.
After she told her story, a woman approached her. It was a journalist who asked if she could interview Kaitlyn for an NPR story. Kaitlyn immediately thought no but went home and talked to Landon about it.
“He was like, ‘Kaitlyn, if it’s going to spread awareness, I mean, if you want things to change, maybe this is the only way,’” she recalls. “And he talked me into it.”
After NPR told her story, Kaitlyn got another request, this time from 60 Minutes. It was as if a dam burst. Suddenly Kaitlyn was everywhere. Local media, more national media. Then she got a call. It was the team running President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, who invited her to events at the White House in support of reproductive justice. She began to work more closely with them and agreed to be a surrogate for the campaign.
The NPR story aired almost two years ago, and the whirlwind keeps going. In the first half of 2024, Kaitlyn began doing more reproductive justice work alongside prominent activists like former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who lives part-time in New Orleans and embarked on an abortion storytelling project to share the realities of those impacted by the ban. Kaitlyn would work her full-time job; spend hours trying to find women willing to share their abortion stories; and help the now Harris-Walz campaign, hopping on a flight with sometimes less than a day’s notice. Oh, and she was now raising two kids. In August 2023 she and Landon welcomed their second child, a son.
Kaitlyn wears all of her different hats proudly. At one of the storytelling events in June, Kaitlyn was seemingly everywhere at all times doing everything at once. She was calling the storytellers, assuaging their concerns, and trying to convince more women to speak out. She was pulling up the day’s long, complicated schedules, kicking off her shoes to sit cross-legged on a couch, and working the phones to ensure everyone knew when they were supposed to arrive. Sitting beside her was her huge tote bag full of supplies and papers and work materials, and sticking out at the front, her breast pump flanges, the battle flag of the working mother.
Then there’s the work she does off the clock, so to speak, which can be much harder. Like responding to the messages she gets on social media from women sharing their own stories. Because she’s become such a prominent face of abortion access in Louisiana, women find her online and pour their hearts out to her.
“What has been extremely heavy for me is the amount of women that have reached out to me about their experience of being denied care or having to cross state lines to save their own lives,” she says. Or, sometimes, they are contacting her to tell her of a woman (and Kaitlyn notes, these are mostly women of color) whom they lost because she could not access care. Sometimes they will DM Kaitlyn an obituary.
“‘This is my friend,’ or ‘This is my sister,’ ‘This is my mom who was unable to get access to this care as a result [of the ban] and she didn’t.’ Or, ‘The physician wouldn’t see her for 12 weeks and didn’t realize she had an underlying issue that led to her blood clots,’ etc.,” she says. “So those stories are always really hard to read.”
Then there are the political attacks. Shortly after she spoke at the DNC, Louisiana attorney general Liz Murrill attempted to discredit Kaitlyn and her story, writing on Twitter that “Democrats have their facts wrong.”
“There is nothing in our bipartisan law that prohibits emergency care for someone having a miscarriage or any emergency situation during pregnancy. Nothing. Hard stop,” she wrote.
It was a punch in the gut, one Kaitlyn has turned over in her mind ever since. To her, Murrill was both calling her a liar and infantilizing her, acting as if she’d been brainwashed into supporting the Harris campaign. For a Black woman, being disbelieved so publicly by a white woman politician was an extra layer of fury.
How dare you try to discredit someone’s story? she thought.
As her work on the issue intensifies, Kaitlyn struggles with mom guilt, with feeling that she’s not present enough for her family. She doesn’t love leaving her kids, especially her now one-year-old. So she has brought him on nearly every one of her trips, along with a babysitter. If her daughter’s not in school, the six-year-old will tag along as well; on the last day of the storytelling event, she proudly performed both of her dance recital routines in front of a gathered crowd, in a conference room so as to not interrupt the videography taking place next door. It’s not a typical family Sunday, but her daughter doesn’t seem to mind.
So none of it is easy. But Kaitlyn keeps going because she knows she’s on the right track. She has never felt more fulfilled than she has this year, fighting for reproductive rights. She’s not certain what the future holds or what she’s going to do past November. But she knows she needs to keep going.
“I know the fire that I’m feeling under my feet is not going anywhere,” she says. “I finally feel like I’ve found my place and my scope of work that I should be working on. I feel at home here. I felt like reproductive health care is definitely something that I should have just done a long time ago. And in a weird way, I’m almost grateful for my experience. It helped me understand my privilege in a lot of ways up until this moment and what people have been telling me for years, which is that women of color have the hardest time tapping into this health care system that is systemically racist. So I have a whole new outlook on it and I want to do something with it.”
When she’s not speaking to an audience of millions on the stage at the Democratic National Convention or traveling the country to speak about abortion rights, Hadley is just another server at a restaurant in Georgetown, Kentucky.
Sometimes her patrons recognize her. Sometimes they don’t.
Those who do recognize her can be kind, or not. Once, a patron didn’t speak to her the entire time she served him. When he left, she saw he hadn’t left her a tip. Instead, on the line where a tip would go, he had written “pro-life.”
This new notoriety is ironic, because in high school all Hadley had wanted was to be anonymous. To escape her hometown of Owensboro, nearly three hours away, where everyone knew what had happened to her.
Owensboro and the neighboring town of Henderson are places where everyone knows everyone, and most people don’t leave. Families stretch back for generations, and the kids are raised among a huge gaggle of cousins and aunts and uncles and stepsiblings. They marry young and have kids young, sometimes in reverse order. It’s the type of place where before you step foot in their classroom, your teachers will have likely taught your siblings, probably your cousins, and maybe even your parents. So when Hadley’s abuser was arrested in 2017 for his actions against her, everyone knew who his victim had been.
When she was 14 and had just finished her freshman year of high school, Hadley decided to tell her mom what her husband had been doing. Her mother reacted immediately. She moved Hadley to a safe location and confronted her abuser. He is now serving 20 years in prison for his crimes against her.
After his arrest, local media jumped on the story. They shared extremely graphic descriptions of what Hadley’s abuser had done to her, going into detail that she would never have wanted people to know. People could read between the lines; they knew who his victim was. When she returned to high school for her sophomore year, she could look at the faces of everyone around her and see it. They knew what had happened, every last, excruciating detail.
“The teachers knew a lot of it, all the students knew, and it wasn’t really on my terms,” she says.
Hadley tried to be open about it with her friends; they have provided her endless support, she says. She told them they could ask her anything; they didn’t have to tiptoe around her. But most people didn’t talk to her about it. Except one time, she was at a party and a boy made a rape joke to her, alluding to her abuse. She punched him in the mouth.
There were heroes in her story too. One was her high school guidance counselor, who sat with her and patiently helped her fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid for college, who helped her visit Midway University, a Christian school three hours away whose coaches were interested in her playing soccer for them. Hadley wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to do with her life, but she knew she wanted to escape.
“I had something I was running from,” she says. “I never want to go back and live in Owensboro or Henderson because it shaped me before I could even shape me.”
A few years later Hadley had much to be proud of. She was playing soccer at Midway and studying for a degree in psychology with a focus on alcohol and drug counseling. But she felt adrift.
The feeling came to a head one night when she was talking to her boyfriend, Hayden, then a college basketball player with dreams of coaching professionally. She was complaining that he was so obsessed with basketball. Didn’t he ever think about everything else? He responded in an offhand way, telling her, “Well, it’s my passion. Once you figure out your passion, you’ll get it.” To both of their surprise, Hadley started sobbing.
“When he said that, it was like a gut punch to me, because it was somebody actually saying out loud that I was lost,” she says.
If Roe v. Wade had never been overturned, would she still be lost? It’s hard to say, but it was that monumental decision that ended up changing her life, leading her to the purpose that she craved.
After reading about the decision in June 2022, Hadley suddenly knew she couldn’t stay silent.
“All the conversations and all the talk about it…nobody was really talking from the survivor standpoint,” she says. “People were degrading it by saying that the statistics of ‘it’s so small’ and everything. That just made me feel like I was being belittled by so many strangers.”
So she shared her story in a post, texting Hayden cheekily that she was about to “shock the world” on Facebook. For the most part, people were supportive. It got a lot of shares, but eventually things died down.
Then, a year later, she got a call. A man from the office of Andy Beshear, her state’s Democratic governor who was running for reelection in November, said they had seen her Facebook post. He asked if she would be willing to film an ad about the governor’s opponent, Daniel Cameron, and his antiabortion policies.
Hadley said, “Why not?” She filmed the video. In it she speaks directly to the camera, calm, cool, and collected. She looks like a woman with a purpose.
“This is to you, Daniel Cameron,” she said. “To tell a 12-year-old girl she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her is unthinkable.”
Like Kaitlyn’s, Hadley’s life has never really been the same after that. After graduating from Midway in May, she had planned on going to grad school to become a social worker, but as she was graduating from college, the Harris-Walz campaign asked her to become a surrogate. With all the travel she does on behalf of the campaign, there was no way she could start school in the fall.
So she put her plans on hold. Hayden recently got his dream job, coaching basketball at his alma mater, Georgetown College, about a 20-minute drive from Midway. In August, Hadley, Hayden, and Honey (their dachshund–golden retriever mix, and yes, she’s as adorable as she sounds) moved into their own place a few miles from campus.
Hadley has been working hard to make ends meet, leaving campaign stops with other abortion activists early and adjusting her schedule to ensure she can get enough hours at the restaurant to make rent (the campaign, she notes, covers her travel expenses but does not pay her). The dichotomies of her current life are, frankly, pretty weird.
“I’m still a server,” she says. “It’s not like I just live a luxurious life, just hopping on a plane, being flown out. My trips have to be so short because I have to make sure I can get back to work before bills are due. I would say that’s hard, because it takes up a lot of time.”
Sometimes she feels self-conscious. She’ll meet some person with a super-fancy job, and her stomach will twist a bit when they ask her what she does for work.
“I don’t see it as degrading, because serving is hard-ass work, and half the people in politics would never make it as a server,” she says. “But I know what it looks like in a conversation. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m a waitress.’”
But also like Kaitlyn, she finds solace in the fact that she’s never been more fulfilled in her life.
“I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to do something for the better good,” she says, “I’ve wanted to have a big purpose, wanted to fulfill that purpose, and really find what that is. I never thought that it would be advocating in the way that it is, but it definitely has allowed me to really open a new door of my healing journey. And I’m really grateful for that.”
It’s a gorgeous day in late August in New York City, one of those that remind you fall is just around the corner. Pop music is playing on the speakers, the glam squad is assembled, and beautiful clothes and jewelry are laid out on a table.
Kaitlyn and Hadley have both flown in for their Glamour Women of the Year cover shoot and are brimming with excitement. Hadley tells me she stayed in a hotel room overlooking the World Trade Center fountains and spent the night before on the balcony, listening to the water and taking it all in.
In coverage of reproductive rights and abortion activists, there tends to be a narrative in the press. Often the stories that are told are presented with a sense of shock and horror, a sense of “Can you believe this happened to them?” Women are expected to parade their trauma to be heard and then are sometimes given the patronizing title of victim. “Oh, poor you,” people will say. “We are so sorry that happened to you.”
But as Kaitlyn and Hadley stand in front of the camera, beautiful and strong and vibrant, they are nobody’s victims. They are survivors. They are women who have taken the worst that the patriarchy has thrown at them, all their pain and the disrespect and the mistreatment, and have turned it into their strength. Later, Kaitlyn says that standing there with Hadley, as the public face of all the women fighting back against restrictions on all of our rights, she could only feel one way. Powerful. She felt so, so powerful.
It’s a power that Hadley feels, too, every time she tells her story.
“I don’t care if it makes you uncomfortable that I’m talking about my story,” she says. “I don’t care if the word abortion makes you uncomfortable. The rape made me more uncomfortable. So [it’s about] taking your power back.”
Together they stand in their power, hands clasped, shoulders proud. The camera clicks just as they both break into matching beautiful, radiant smiles.
Photographer: Celeste Sloman
Stylist: Kat Thomas
Hair: Brenton Diallo
Makeup: Misuzu Miyake
Production: Viewfinders
