Gwen Walz speaks along with other women in Michigan against Trump’s vision for abortion

First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Walz speaks to a crowd at an event at Lansing Community College in Michigan where Walz and other speakers talked about reproductive freedom and the importance of electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz in the upcoming election on Sept. 24, 2024. | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols

The future that former president Donald Trump has planned for women is “terrifying”, First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Walz told a crowd in Lansing, Michigan on Tuesday.

Even as Trump denies any connection to Project 2025, a controversial Republican playbook for the next presidential administration where reproductive health care would be limited, Walz told the crowd at Lansing Community College voters need only look at what Trump has already done to women.

Walz told the story of Amber Thurman, a 28-year-old mom of a six-year-old boy in Georgia who in 2022 was working as a medical assistant in the hopes of becoming a nurse. 

But in August of 2022 Thurman needed medical care after suffering complications from taking abortion pills she received in North Carolina as Georgia had just passed its 6-week abortion ban, according to reporting from ProPublica last week.

After 20 hours of waiting in agony in a hospital bed while hospital staff hesitated on performing a procedure to save Thurman’s life that they worried could lead to prosecution under the state’s abortion ban, Thurman died. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee determined Thurman’s death was preventable.

“To think of what happens when politicians get between women and their doctors…Women just like Amber are getting turned away from emergency rooms in this country, forced to the brink of death before they can finally get the medical care they need, and in some cases, it’s too late,” Walz said. “And all, all, all because of Trump’s abortion bans.”

Trump has taken ownership as the driving force behind the fall of Roe v. Wade, which until 2022 guaranteed the federal right to an abortion. Though in the months leading up to the election Trump has asserted that he’d allow states to choose legality of abortion, Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz have been visiting states telling voters Trump won’t stop until abortion is banned nationally, even in states like Michigan where voters have enshrined the right to an abortion in the state constitution.

Trump and his running mate, U.S. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH), are trying to stick their nose in peoples’ bedrooms and doctor’s appointments, Gwen Walz said, and Michigan is going to slam the door shut and elect Harris in November.

In order to help her husband’s campaign and support Harris, Walz visited Michigan at the beginning of the month in Grand Rapids, talking with educators, calling on them to “use their teacher voice” in this election. On Tuesday, Walz upped the ante, pulling out her “teacher glasses” inviting the crowd to use their teacher voices to say “Mr. Trump, Mr. Vance, please, mind your own business.”

First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Walz speaks to a crowd at an event at Lansing Community College in Michigan where Walz and other speakers talked about reproductive freedom and the importance of electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz in the upcoming election on Sept. 24, 2024. | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols

Walz said being a mom was a dream for her, telling the story she and her husband have been sharing on the campaign trail of their long and often discouraging journey through infertility. It was an emotional time, one that she and her husband kept private, except for their neighbor Mary, a nurse, that could help administer injections to help in her fertility journey.

“Coach Walz is good at a lot of things, but it’s a good thing he’s not a nurse or a doctor,” Walz said to the laughter of the crowd. 

Trump and Vance are running on a supposed pro-family platform, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel told the crowd, but in truth, they aren’t interested in helping families, just taking freedoms away from women.

Nessel has shared her story of going through in vitro fertilization, or IVF, publicly amid conversations on reproductive health care. She told the Lansing crowd Tuesday she had always wanted to be a mom, knowing what she was going to name her kids since she was a child.

Michigan Attorney general Dana Nessel (left) speaks alongside First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Walz (right) to a crowd at an event at Lansing Community College in Michigan about reproductive freedom and the importance of electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz in the upcoming election on Sept. 24, 2024. | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols

“I was thrilled when I became pregnant with triplets. It was the happiest day of my life, but it was the saddest day of my life when my OBGYN told me that if I did not abort one of them the other two would die, and that there would be significant physical consequences for me as well,” Nessel said. “I never expected that to happen to me. I never expected to have to make that choice, but I thank God that I had the ability to do it. And when I look at Donald Trump and I look at J.D. Vance, like, do you want me to be a mother, or do you want me to be a childless cat lady?”

The ability to have an abortion after being in and out of the hospital throughout her pregnancy, allowed Nessel, a loyal University of Michigan alumna and supporter to experience something she couldn’t have thought of — “two healthy babies that now have turned into Michigan State students.”

Trump is proudly responsible for “every cruel abortion ban across this country” that has robbed women and little girls of choice, Hadley Duvall, 22, said.

Starting at the age of five, Duvall said her then-stepfather sexually abused her. At the age of 12, he impregnated her. 

“I remember standing in my bathroom, a 12-year-old child holding a pregnancy test and feeling deeply afraid,” Duvall said. “The first thing I heard was, ‘you have options’. I didn’t know what that meant. I was 12, but I knew that that meant I would be okay.”

Reflecting on being abused in Kentucky, which now has a total abortion ban, Duvall condemned Trump’s repeated assertion that making abortion access a state is a “beautiful” thing.

Hadley Duvall, 22, a sexual assault survivor and advocate for reproductive rights speaks at an event at Lansing Community College in Michigan where First Lady of Minnesota Gwen Walz and other speakers talked about reproductive freedom and the importance of electing Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor of Minnesota Tim Walz in the upcoming election on Sept. 24, 2024. | Photo: Anna Liz Nichols

“I’ll keep asking him, what is so beautiful about telling a 12-year-old girl that she must have the baby of her stepfather who raped her, to tell a girl who was already robbed of her childhood that you will now be taking her future away too,” Duvall said. “That’s what Roe used to give survivors, at the very least, the option to take your power back when someone stripped it from you. To every survivor listening, please know you are not alone. We see you, we hear you, and we will transform our experiences into better change.”