Tennessee’s abortion ban put her at risk – now she’s running for office to change the law
Allie Phillips thinks of herself as the ordinary neighbor nextdoor. She shops at the Walmart clearance rack. She posts TikTok videos of herself and her six-year-old daughter, Adalie, singing along to Taylor Swift and dancing the Wednesday Addams dance. Up until recently, the most political thing she’d ever done was vote, and only in presidential elections.
While she was outraged by the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade last year, the 28-year-old from Tennessee never imagined she would need an abortion – much less that, after publicly sharing her story of being denied one, she would decide to run for office.
“I’m a mom. I have a daughter in the public schools. I’m not a polished politician. I’m not a self-made millionaire,” Phillips said. “I have the most to lose in this race, but I also have the most to gain. And I’m running off of a personal tragedy at the hands of my own government.”
Last month, Phillips became one of several women around the country to sue their states for denying them abortions that, they said, were medically necessary. Now, she’s campaigning to win a Tennessee statehouse seat that has not been represented by a Democrat in more than a decade, in a district that former president Donald Trump won by 55% in 2020. The Republican who currently represents the district in the statehouse, Jeff Burkhart, ran unopposed in the last election.
“I’m gonna try. I don’t know if I’m gonna win, but I’m gonna sure as hell try,” Phillips said. “And if anything, at least I’m making him fight for his seat.”
Phillips became a single mom at 22 before meeting her now husband three years later. They had a plan: after getting married, they would buy a house and then start trying for a baby. By November 2022, Phillips was pregnant.
They named the fetus, a girl, Miley.
Everything seemed fine until an anatomy scan at around 19 weeks into Phillips’ pregnancy. About five minutes in, the ultrasound tech stopped the scan and said she needed to go get the doctor. “I never want to give anybody bad news,” the tech said, before she left the room.
Within a few days, Phillips’ pregnancy had been diagnosed with a litany of devastating issues. The fetus was swimming in too little amniotic fluid. Miley’s stomach and bladder were abnormal. Her heart was not working properly. Her lungs were underdeveloped. Finally, her brain had not split into two hemispheres.
There was nothing that could be done to heal Miley; if the fetus made it to birth – and that was a big if – she would probably die soon afterward. Phillips had just two options: she could continue her pregnancy, at great risk to her own health, or she could get an abortion. But she couldn’t get one in Tennessee, because the state bans abortion in almost all circumstances.
Phillips got a 4-D ultrasound to embed a recording of Miley’s heartbeat into a stuffed animal. Then, after a day of calling abortion clinics in states that still permit the procedure, Phillips secured an appointment in New York City, a place she’d never been. Thanks to a GoFundMe and the generosity of “strangers on the internet”, Phillips said, she was able to afford the flights to New York as well as the $1,100 procedure.
The abortion clinic’s policies meant Phillips had to go to the clinic on her own, without her husband. She had been prepared to do a day of routine testing, followed by an abortion the following day. But during her ultrasound at the clinic, she learned that Miley’s heartbeat had stopped, a development that meant Phillips was at risk of developing blood clots and going into sepsis. Rather than waiting, the providers at the clinic rushed to end Phillips’ pregnancy.
“I have never felt so small as a person,” Phillips recalled. In her Uber after the procedure,she said:“I remember looking out of the window and seeing kids skipping down the sidewalk, seeing people walking their dogs, people in business suits on phone calls. And it just broke me apart. Because their days were OK, their day was fine. There was nothing wrong in their day. And my day was the worst day of my life.”
As she retold her story to the Guardian, Phillips’ daughter Adalie interrupted her.
“Mommy, you need to stop crying,” she told her mom.
“I’m sorry,” Phillips said, with a slight laugh. “Am I disrupting your TV watching?”
“No, I stopped it because you were crying,” Adalie said. She added, softly: “I don’t want you to cry, Mommy.”
After coming forward with her story, Phillips started to envision what a potential “Miley’s Law” could look like, one that could help families in her situation in the future. Although she would ideally want abortions to just be legal and accessible, she knew that getting such a law past the Republican majority that controls the Tennessee state legislature would be virtually impossible. Instead, Phillips wanted to carve out more exceptions to give people options when pregnancies went wrong.
She met with Burkhart, her statehouse representative, to try to advance her proposal, Phillips said. Burkhart seemed to fail to understand some basic details of her story and about pregnancy.
He suggested, Phillips said, that her situation would be covered by an exception that lets women get abortions if their pregnancies endanger their lives, even though Phillips’ case was not imminently life-threatening. Doctors and abortion rights supporters say these kinds of exceptions are too vague to be workable, since they force doctors to wait for patients to get sick enough to die before they can intervene.
Burkhart also appeared to believe that pregnancy complications, such as miscarriages, didn’t happen to women who had already had children. “He was like, ‘Well, I mean, I’m just a guy, but I had always watched and heard that the bad things only happened in the first pregnancy.’ I’m like, ‘What? Who told you that?’” Phillips recounted.
Burkhart did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Phillips’ account of their meeting, or on his stance on abortion laws.
After that conversation, multiple people approached Phillips to suggest she run for office, Phillips said. She began to consider each person a sign from the universe, pushing her to run.
“I can scream on TikTok, I can scream at marches, I can scream at the Capitol every day for the rest of my life. But that’s not going to change the people inside who are voting,” she said. “I have to be inside. I have to be the one that’s voting – on the actual bills, not on the ballot.”
Phillips’ platform is based on more than abortion: she feels strongly about increasing public school funding and staffing, background checks for firearms and supporting LGBTQ+ families and their rights.
As a member of the first generation of women to run for office after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Phillips and her candidacy will be a test of how much abortion rights can sway an election even in traditionally red states like Tennessee. More than 80% of all Tennessee voters think abortion should be legal in cases that pose a threat to the life or health of the mother, an April poll from Vanderbilt University found. And although most Tennessee voters think abortion should be illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy, they also think there should be exceptions in cases of rape, incest or medical emergencies.
Although the Tennessee governor, Bill Lee, a Republican, in April quietly added some narrow exceptions to Tennessee’s abortion ban for medical emergencies, the language of additions mirrors the bills in other states that doctors have declared unworkable. There are also still no exceptions for rape or incest.
Phillips’ candidacy doesn’t feel quite real to her yet. So far, she’s focused on promoting her campaign through social media and interviews. “I haven’t been in a room of people holding a sign with my name on it yet,” she said.
At the very least, she’s hoping her candidacy will encourage other women to run for office.
“There’s never a good time to have a baby, right? There’s never going to be a good time to run for office,” she said. “You take that chance and you jump and you hope for the best.”