At Texas abortion event, men call on each other to speak out for reproductive rights

AUSTIN, Texas – It’s been almost a year since Ryan Hamilton went viral with his story about carrying his pregnant wife from a puddle of blood on their bathroom floor into his truck to drive to a Texas hospital for the fourth time seeking care. He still vibrates with an intense anger when he speaks about it publicly.

To him, it’s not just a sad story about an incomplete miscarriage — he doesn’t see the fight for reproductive rights changing because of sad stories. Hamilton wants something closer to a revolution, and one of the places it should come from, he said, is men. He doesn’t mince words about it either.

“I find it frustrating and lazy that men don’t get involved,” Hamilton said. “Why are you not out here going, ‘How dare you?’ … You’re happy to let your wife or daughter go out and tell their nightmare story over and over again while you sit your lazy ass at home?”

Hamilton was part of a panel of men who spoke Sunday at Abortion in America in Austin, Texas, an inaugural event that was co-founded by author Lauren Peterson, activist Kaitlyn Joshua and former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, who died in January. Organizers hope to make it a yearly conference meant to highlight storytellers who have been affected by abortion bans and restrictions, to recognize their contributions and to talk about how it makes a difference. Every panel before exclusively featured women, including those who were denied abortion care, doctors who are frustrated by how the laws limit their practice, and the mother of Amber Nicole Thurman of Georgia, who died in 2022 after delayed miscarriage care.

A 2024 Pew Research Center poll showed nearly the same percentage of men and women supported legal abortion in all or most cases, with 61% support from men and 64% from women. But men — from governors to legislators — are often leading efforts to restrict or ban abortion, contraception and other reproductive services. They are also at the helm of some of the most extreme anti-abortion groups, like Operation Save America and Abolitionists Rising, which call for total bans with no exceptions. Anti-abortion advocates for Operation Save America have discussed murder charges for the pregnant person, while Abolitionists Rising openly advocates for it.

Texas has a near-total abortion ban with no health exception, and a penalty of up to 99 years in prison and loss of licensure for the physician who performs an abortion.

The last panel over the weekend was about men’s voices in the argument for reproductive freedom, and featured four other speakers. Josh Zurawski, who is married to the lead plaintiff in a Texas lawsuit over abortion access, Amanda Zurawski. She was 18 weeks pregnant in 2022 when her water broke prematurely, and the fetus died in utero. An infection developed, and she couldn’t get abortion care until she was septic three days later. One of her fallopian tubes was permanently damaged in the process, which affects her future fertility.

While he agreed with Hamilton’s general sentiment, Josh Zurawski said it was important to mention that men didn’t have to consider reproductive health care for the 50 years that Roe v. Wade was in place before the U.S. Supreme Court upended the law in 2022. He said he went on a “crash course” over three days to learn enough to be able to help his wife.

“I think what makes it very difficult for men to know where to start talking about this is it’s very overwhelming,” he said. “We need to help men understand what reproductive health care really is before they’re going to start feeling comfortable talking about it.”

Kayden Coleman, a transgender man on the panel, said men shouldn’t be treated like “little, fragile babies” who can’t learn and speak up while women are at the forefront of the issue.

Jason Nichols, a professor and contributor as a progressive voice on the conservative Newsmax, said at times when he’s been speaking about bodily autonomy, he has been told by a woman that he shouldn’t be in the conversation. Coleman said that wasn’t an excuse.

“I’m so sick and tired of seeing women and people like myself that have to be at the forefront of this (stuff) when they know that (decisionmakers) aren’t going to listen to us,” Coleman said. “Why? Because women are emotional, trans men are delusional. … But they’ll listen to men.”

The panel also included Devin Wright, a Baptist pastor at a church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who said that day was his first time speaking publicly about current policies around reproductive rights. Wright, who also has worked in Texas and Florida, said he has seen the effects of restrictive abortion policies in all three states.

He said he felt it was important to speak about the issue because he sees the practice of legislating morality as a slippery slope, and that people of faith should be more thoughtful and compassionate in their approach to those who may be making a choice about abortion.

“My call may be to speak to as many people as possible, to say, maybe there is a different option, maybe there is a far better way,” Wright said. “That’s the work of evangelism, right? … Why don’t we think of it from that perspective?”

Wright said he struggled with the decision to speak, especially since it was on a Sunday, when he would normally be in the pulpit.

“I think there are so many well-meaning faith leaders who are saying, ‘I don’t want to say something that then people take as, ‘This is what God says about it,’” Wright said. “I can deal with a little discomfort, because there’s a world of people dealing with discomfort where faith is weaponized against them.”

At the end of the panel, Hamilton asked to stand up. He looked at a place in the room above the audience and nearly shouted into the microphone as he spoke, saying he wanted to show men who want to speak out a way they should get their message across.

“My wife was tortured for four days until she almost bled to death on our bathroom floor. I had to drag her bloody, lifeless body from our bathroom through our living room, put her body into the truck, get our then-9-month-old daughter into a car seat, and drive on our fourth trip to a separate hospital,” Hamilton said emphatically. “And I will be damned if my daughter is going to grow up and get pregnant and lose a baby and then bleed to death in a bathroom like her mom almost did.”