MADISON, Wis. — Last Friday, the New York Times highlighted Dr. Kristin Lyerly’s campaign in the 8th Congressional District and the enthusiasm fueling her campaign to be the first pro-choice OB-GYN in Congress. While Republican Tony Wied would serve as a rubber stamp for Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda, Dr. Lyerly will work across the aisle to lower costs for Wisconsin families, expand access to health care, and invest in Wisconsin’s rural communities.

The New York Times: The OB-GYN Running on Abortion Rights in Conservative Wisconsin
By: Jess Bidgood

• Abortion rights have become central to the fight for control of the White House and Congress, and Democrats have worked hard to bring the issue to life through the stories of women who have had abortions. Lyerly, though, is doing something a little rarer: campaigning as a Democrat who can talk about providing reproductive care in post-Roe America.
  
  
• She said she had bumped into children she delivered on the trail. She has been approached by women at campaign events seeking basic information about handling an unwanted pregnancy or a miscarriage. She hasn’t heeded the advice that she said she got from men suggesting she talk about the issue a little bit less.
  
  
• “Reproductive rights,” she told a group of teachers who gathered to knock on doors in Green Bay, Wis., last weekend, “are on everybody’s mind.”
  
  
• Lyerly, though, is betting that running on reproductive rights can help Democrats make inroads even here, in a culturally conservative and heavily Catholic part of the state. And as part of the recent explosion of Democratic activism in the state that my colleague Jonathan Weisman wrote about this morning, she has helped to recruit a cohort of down-ballot candidates in the area who share that belief.
  
  
• “Women deserve better. We’re not just machines. You can’t just change out a part,” she told me in an interview. “We are human beings, and it’s not just us who go through these things — it’s the people in our lives, our partners and our kids and the people who love us.”
  
  
• It was not very long ago that Lyerly, who is a mother of four, worried that her background — which includes a stint working as an assistant in an abortion clinic early in her career — could be a political liability. When she ran unsuccessfully for the State Assembly in 2020, she said, she didn’t talk about it at all.
  
  
• Lyerly went to work at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sheboygan, Wis., in early 2022, and watched as abortions were outlawed in the state in an instant.
  
  
• “I threw caution to the wind, and said, ‘We have to talk about it,’” Lyerly said.
  
  
• She joined a lawsuit challenging the state’s 1849 abortion ban and began practicing in Minnesota. Planned Parenthood has since resumed providing abortions in Wisconsin, but she has continued to work out of state.
  
  
• “I’ve had patients arrive bleeding — wanted pregnancy — prior to 24 weeks, right in that 22-24 week span,” Lyerly said. “In Wisconsin, I would be wondering, ‘If I do her abortion to save her life, am I going to get in trouble? Am I going to lose my license?’ In Minnesota, I didn’t have to think twice about it.” 
  
  
• The candidates here have also become accustomed to finding voters who want to support them quietly. Lyerly said one woman had come to the local Democratic Party headquarters recently, asking if she could write the party a check without her husband finding out. There are sticky notes that voters can take to stick in bathrooms, urging women to vote for Lyerly or Vice President Kamala Harris.
  
  
• “Woman to woman,” one note said, “your vote is private.”
  
  
• Welch spoke on Saturday with a voter who told her that she planned to vote for her, Lyerly, and other Democrats up and down the ticket. She had grown up in a deeply conservative household, she said, and she didn’t like the idea of late-term abortions, but she planned to vote for candidates who supported a woman’s right to them.
  
  
• “If anybody asked, I’m not so conservative this year, because they’re so far off the rails,” she told me.