The new face of the antiabortion movement is a young mom
ST. LOUIS – When state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman stepped up to the microphone, her male colleagues stopped talking. Inside a crisis pregnancy center, Missouri’s secretary of state, three state representatives, a state senator and several support staff – all White men – settled into their folding chairs to listen to the woman one called the “female face of the pro-life movement.”
“I’m a mother of six,” Coleman, 39, said as she addressed the 20 people in the crowd. “My first son was born between my first and second years of law school. My second son was nursed as I was handed my law school degree.”
She’d brought everyone together on this afternoon in mid-December to announce her new antiabortion bill, an eight-week ban mimicking the law that has successfully eradicated almost all abortions in Texas since Sept. 1. Coleman chose to debut her legislation here, in a room with rhinestone-studded walls and a “believe in your selfie” station, because the pregnancy center’s guiding ethos aligns with her own: Faced with an unexpected pregnancy, Coleman says, women “will rise to the occasion.”
“Women deserve better than abortion,” she said before passing the mic to the first of five men.
In the spring of 2019, as state after state passed unprecedented abortion bans, the antiabortion movement was criticized for the White male faces who led the charge. As advocates on both sides now brace for the end of Roe v. Wade, the antiabortion movement has reimagined its message and its messengers. In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that could eliminate the constitutional right to abortion, the state of Mississippi centered the woman, rather than the baby, arguing that abortion bans “empower” women to be their full selves, a claim critics say is hypocritical, especial
ly coming from privileged White politicians. Coleman is among the young women and mothers who have emerged to usher the antiabortion movement into its next phase.
While Republicans have long lagged behind Democrats in electing women to public office, GOP women triumphed in 2020, when 17 won seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Many young, conservative women who have won seats at the state level are now leading the antiabortion cause, said Sue Liebel, state policy director for Susan B. Anthony List, which works to elect antiabortion candidates. In West Virginia, 32-year-old Kayla Kessinger. In Ohio, 27-year-old Jena Powell. In Florida, 44-year-old Erin Grall. Liebel travels from state to state, recruiting them.
At the crisis pregnancy center, state Rep. Doug Richey, R, who spoke after Coleman, said he’s been told to “sit down and shut up” because, as a man, he has “no right” to speak about abor
tion. Richey points his skeptics to women like Coleman, who he says understand the “challenges and difficulties” of motherhood.
“Anyone who would claim that the pro-life community is just a bunch of men who are trying to control the lives of women – they do not know what reality is,” Richey said.
Coleman gets a little thrill from defying people’s expectations. She is a Catholic attorney who buttons her cotton cardigans all the way to the top but blasts Lizzo and Beyoncé as she runs at 6 o’clock in the morning. After a long day, she and her husband will indulge in a cocktail from the book “Drinking With the Saints: The Sinner’s Guide to a Holy Happy Hour.” Then she turns on “The West Wing” – her favorite TV show, despite the Democratic president.
As the event ended, Coleman stood between her navy – and black-blazered colleagues for a picture, distinct in Chanel lip gloss and a designer dress.
“A rose between many thorns,” one of the male politicians said as they moved into position.
Coleman looked into the camera and laughed. Soon news of her bill would reach the Planned Parenthood clinic five blocks down the road.
“I think there are some who would call me a thorn,” she said.
– – If Coleman ever runs for national office, she knows what her walk-up song will be. Driving her Chevy Suburban home from the state Capitol in Jefferson City the week before she filed her bill, Coleman belted out “Piece of Me” by Britney
Spears.
“With a kid on my arm, I’m still an exceptional player,” she sings. “You want a piece of me?”
The song takes her back to her 2018 campaign for state representative, when she went door to door for hours with her 1-year-old on her back, while her older kids – now 16, 15, 13, 12 and 10 – trailed behind. In Coleman’s Catholic community on the outskirts of St. Louis, her family is a “normal” size: You’re not truly “big” until you have eight or nine kids, she says. (To fit her family, her next-door neighbor had to buy a bus.)
After an eight-year career as an estate lawyer, Coleman said she turned to state politics out of frustration. She didn’t think the other Republican candidates could flip her purple district.
“I just looked around the field and thought, ‘These guys can’t win and I can.’ “
Soon pundits were calling her “The Iron Lady of Jefferson County,” where she lives, after the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Coleman relishes the comparison – almost as much as she appreciates another one people sometimes draw, to Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. A Catholic mother of seven, Barrett represents a version of feminism that aligns with Coleman’s own antiabortion views, the state representative says. Coleman has reclaimed an iconic critique of Barrett with a laptop sticker that reads, in swirly cursive: “May the dogma live loudly within you.”
“If the alternative is to be called a hypocrite, then yeah, I’m glad that the dogma lives loudly within me,” Coleman said.
Coleman knew she’d do more than her competitors to further the antiabortion effort. Five months after joining the legislature, she was part of the four-person team that passed House Bill 126, Missouri’s “heartbeat bill,” which would further limit abortion across the state. Although the courts struck down the eight-week abortion ban before it took effect, Coleman and her colleagues intentionally drafted their bill as a package of restrictions, some of which would take effect even if others were blocked. The bill included a “trigger law,” which would ban all abortions as soon as Roe v. Wade is overturned.