How a personal experience with abortion is guiding the Senate Democrats' campaign chair

WASHINGTON — It’s still hard for Sen. Gary Peters to talk about.

About 40 years ago, his then-wife's water broke four months into a very much-wanted pregnancy. Doctors told them “there’s no way” the baby could survive, he recalled in an interview with NBC News; he and Heidi were told they should let a miscarriage happen naturally.

After three days of what Peters described as “anguish,” the miscarriage didn’t come — and Heidi’s health deteriorated. But their doctor couldn’t perform an abortion.

“He goes: ‘I went to the hospital board to get permission. There’s no way this baby will survive, but there’s a faint heartbeat. There’s a policy against that,’” Peters said. The Michigan Democrat still remembers the doctor’s words to Heidi: “I’m really worried for your health. You could lose a uterus, you could go septic. I can’t perform this procedure. My advice to you is, find a doctor and a hospital immediately that can do this.”

They did find a doctor to provide the abortion Heidi needed, but as Peters sees it, fortune shouldn’t have had any role in it.

“Politics and policy made the difference that literally put her life in jeopardy,” he said.

Heidi, in a statement to Elle magazine in 2020, called the experience "painful and traumatic," adding, “If it weren’t for urgent and critical medical care, I could have lost my life."

The trauma of that moment is still palpable for Peters, now a two-term senator from Michigan and tasked, for the second time, with leading the campaign to help Democrats keep control of the Senate in the 2024 elections. In 2020, he was the first sitting U.S. senator to publicly share his personal abortion story. Now, he's heading into another election cycle as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, armed with the personal knowledge of how powerfully abortion — stories, access and policy — can affect voters as he seeks to lead Democrats from last “Roevember” to the next one.

As the U.S. this weekend marks one year since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned the constitutional right to abortion, Peters is more sure of the issue’s staying power than ever.

“It is, without question, still a major, major issue and a clear demarcation between where candidates are on an issue of incredible importance to people all across the country,” said Peters, who went on to remarry and have two children with his second wife, Colleen.

An April national NBC News poll found that 43% of Americans rate abortion as an “extremely important” issue to them, or a “10” on a 1-to-10 scale, over a year out from Election Day. Many Republicans, meanwhile, have sought to shift the conversation away from reproductive health and toward the economy, crime and culture war issues, like parents’ roles in education, transgender rights and health care.

Abortion was a winning issue for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, and Peters says he believes it will be again in 2024 when Democrats face a map of tough races.

“The abortion issue played very big in Michigan,” he said. “It turned out voters in very large numbers, particularly young people. … It was because of Proposal 3, which enshrined abortion rights into the Constitution. And folks turned out because they said they did not want to see rights taken away from them.”

There, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election while the state Legislature also flipped blue. Since then, Whitmer’s has fulfilled past promises: officially striking down a 1931 abortion ban from her state’s books after a campaign centered around safeguarding Roe and women’s right to choose.

The Michigan playbook could be a useful one for Peters; one of the seats he's defending this year belongs to his longtime colleague, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., whose retirement opened up a key Senate seat. But Michigan is far from the only state where Peters thinks reproductive access will factor heavily into his work.

He namechecked Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Wisconsin as places where abortion will be significant, adding that the issue “plays even in states that you may think are more conservative.” He pointed to Kansas, where voters in 2022 overwhelmingly struck down a proposed constitutional amendment that would have removed language enshrining reproductive rights.

And Peters says more male voters are becoming part of the conversation.

“After I shared my story ... it wasn’t just women that were reaching out to me,” he said. “It was men who said, ‘My wife went through, our family went through this very same thing. And people have to understand that these laws that are passed that prohibit a woman from doing what’s best based on consultation with her physician is really dangerous.’”

About 500 days out from Election Day, Peters is balancing his personal experience with electoral strategy.

“It’s uncomfortable for me to talk about even though many, many years have passed. It’s still painful in a lot of ways,” Peters admitted. “But people know those stories and you’re seeing that with how people are reacting when these laws are moving forward and you see politicians taking very extreme positions.”

“That impacts people in a very powerful, visceral way," he continued. "And they get out and vote and they’re going to make sure that their voice is heard.”