Her Day in Court

Her Day in

COURT

The lead plaintiff in the most critical abortion rights decision in a generation, Amy Hagstrom Miller ’89 brought her case all the way to the Supreme Court—and won

BY LAURA BILLINGS COLEMAN

F

ew people have studied the optics of abortion as closely as Amy Hagstrom Miller ’89, which is why she put on a bright purple suit the day her case went to the Supreme Court. “When I’ve shown up to testify at the Texas legislature wearing pearls, people will do double-takes because I’m not what they’re expecting,” says Hagstrom Miller, the founder and CEO of Whole Woman’s Health, a national network of independent clinics in Texas, Minnesota, and three other states. With her friendly laugh, fringed bob, and what Mother Jones recently described as her “energized Patricia Arquette” demeanor, she says, “I want to shift the image associated with being an abortion provider.” The lead plaintiff in Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt, Hagstrom Miller and the pro bono legal team from the D.C.–based Center for Reproductive Rights arrived at the nation’s highest court on a Wednesday morning last March to challenge HB2, a 2013 Texas law mandating that physicians providing abortion services have admitting privileges at local hospitals, while requiring abortion clinics to meet the hospital-level standards of an ambulatory surgical center. HB2 is what critics call a “TRAP” law—targeted regulation of abortion providers—one of 288 such laws passed by state legislatures since 2010. During the three years it took for Whole Woman’s Health vs. Hellerstedt to reach the highest court, more than half of that state’s abortion providers had closed their doors—including two clinics owned by Whole Woman’s Health. “I knew what was happening in Texas wasn’t going to stay in Texas,” Hagstrom Miller says. Though her team had won a temporary injunction against the most onerous provisions of HB2, she says, taking her place in the public gallery that morning, “I really had to detach myself from the outcome of winning.” But that began to change very soon in the oral arguments, when Justice Elena Kagan wondered why a law intended to raise the standard of care for women had effectively prevented them from accessing their legal right to abortion services: “It’s almost like the perfect controlled experiment as to the effect of the law isn’t it? It’s like you put the law into effect, 12 clinics closed. You take the law out of effect, they reopen.” Soon after, Justice Stephen Breyer asked the Texas solicitor if he could point to a single woman who’d benefited from new restric12

MACALESTER TODAY

tions—requirements that aren’t the rule for other routine health procedures. The Texas solicitor said no. “That was when I realized we might win,” Hagstrom Miller remembers. “I knew our case chapter and verse, but to hear these brilliant legal minds hold people’s feet to the fire was just incredible.” As she left the chamber that day with Nancy Northrup, president and CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, nearly 3,000 supporters— many also dressed in purple—cheered from below. “We were stepping into this moment that was profound and so much bigger than me,” she says. “And my other thought was, ‘Oh my god, I have to walk down all of these steps without falling.’”

* * * Seeing his wife take center stage in a history-making women’s rights case has been thrilling, challenging, and “also just super tiring,” admits Karl Hagstrom Miller ’90, an associate professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire Department of Music. “We’ve learned so much about how political organizing works, how our legal system works, that we can’t see the world in the same way as we did before,” he says. “Being in the middle of such a momentous series of events— it’s like we’ve received a graduate degree in the inner workings of politics and the law.” Over the past three years, Hagstrom Miller handed over more than 10,000 emails and seven years of clinic documents, laying bare the business model of independent community clinics like hers, which provide nearly 80 percent of abortion procedures in this country. The Whole Woman’s Health staff chose to be equally transparent with the media, allowing documentary filmmaker Dawn Porter to follow patients and providers on the front lines of the Texas fight in Trapped, a film that debuted at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking. Hagstrom Miller herself agreed to hundreds of interview requests from outlets as varied as Rolling Stone and Refinery 29, even changing out of her Halloween costume just before trick-or-treating with Karl and their two boys, then 8 and 10, to talk live with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Yet as her profile rose, and supporters began mobilizing national support behind her Supreme Court case, Hagstrom Miller had to make hard decisions about which battles she couldn’t win. Forced to close