The Annual Luncheon might be over, but the BIG work of electing pro-choice candidates to all levels of public office never stops.

Anti-choice extremists took Roe from us, and they won’t stop there. Just this month, extremists in the US Senate blocked bills guaranteeing the right to contraception and IVF. And as June winds down, we need your help to continue funding our summer programming to help our candidates get elected and stand up to extremism in Minnesota and beyond. 

They’re more organized than ever, but we were built for this. With your help, we will win!

Doctors are running for office in an effort to bring their medical expertise to the debate over reproductive rights. In past campaign years, issues like the Affordable Care Act or gun violence motivated physicians from both parties to run for Congress. This year, access to reproductive care after the Supreme Court's abortion ruling is encouraging more doctors who are Democrats to seek office. Kelly Morrison is one of those candidates. She is an OB-GYN and former state senator, running for Minnesota's third congressional seat.

Both Rachel Bohman of Rochester (Congressional District 1) and Jen Schultz of Duluth (Congressional District 8) are attempting to unseat anti-choice incumbents in the 2024 U.S. Congressional elections in Minnesota. Women’s Press recently joined each of them to learn more about the values, vision, and backgrounds as they campaign in areas of the state where it has been historically difficult for women to get elected.

The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest and most politically powerful Protestant denomination, voted Wednesday to oppose in vitro fertilization. The move may signal the beginning of a broad turn on the right against IVF, an issue that many evangelicals, anti-abortion advocates and other social conservatives see as the “pro-life” movement’s next frontier — one they hope will eventually lead to restrictions, or outright bans, on IVF at the state and federal levels.

IVF has come under increasing scrutiny since the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two years ago. Many on the right have begun to question whether the practice, which often discards fertilized eggs, is at odds with their beliefs on when life begins, even as it is relied upon by millions of Americans to grow their families and is supported by the overwhelming majority of evangelicals.

“It’s going to be a long process. It took us 50 years to take down Roe,” said Brent Leatherwood, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy arm of the SBC. “It may take us a similarly long time frame to get people to a place where they are thinking more deeply about something like this. It’s okay. It takes time. We have to be patient.”