Last January, Jen Jackson Quintano stepped into a theater in Sandpoint, a tiny city in northern Idaho, to debut a production that could best be described as The Vagina Monologues meets The Moth – a night of Idahoans sharing stories about their own reproductive agency.
Quintano was nervous. Idaho, where Republicans outnumber Democrats five to one, has one of the most punitive abortion bans in the country. Further, Quintano lives in a region of the state that keeps making national headlines for bold displays of armed intimidation by militia, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists. This was not necessarily a safe place to talk about abortion.
So that afternoon, as people began filing into the theater, she considered worst-case scenarios – even though she’d promoted the event mostly by word of mouth to avoid alerting disruptors, ensured law enforcement had patrols in the area, and brought in a peacekeeper force of local volunteers trained in de-escalation tactics. One attendee, wearing high heels, stashed sneakers in her bag in case she had to run. Another kept her coat on and her purse on her shoulder for a hasty exit.
Quintano wasn’t a full-time activist; she’d pulled this event together in her spare time between running a chainsaw and driving one-ton trucks for her family’s arborist business. She empathized with attendees’ apprehension: “My husband had volunteered as a peacekeeper, my mother-in-law was in the audience, we were all there. And I had this morbid thought: what is my daughter left with if shit goes down?”
Quintano, 44, isn’t an inconspicuous target. Tall and lanky, with a purple streak in her blond hair and a silver ring glinting in her nose, she’s easy to pick out of a crowd. In a year-plus as north Idaho’s lone abortion rights organizer, she’s had no qualms about showing herself; her face appears all over the website and Instagram of the Pro-Voice Project, the organization she founded last March to encourage abortion storytelling in Idaho. “How can I ask other people to put themselves out there, if I’m not willing to do that myself?” she says.
But nothing out of the ordinary happened at the performance – except for 200 people attending in a town with a population of just 9,000. Afterwards, Quintano walked into the local pub, where a group of men who’d been in attendance were talking openly about reproductive rights. A couple weeks later, a man cornered her in the grocery store and told her about a woman he had been with years ago having an abortion. “He’d never told anyone this, and he said, ‘I’m going to write it down now, it’s time for me to share it with my kids,’” Quintano says. Another woman, who’d submitted a story for the performance anonymously and even deleted the file from her computer after she’d printed it out, has since become a vocal advocate for reproductive rights.
They were glimmers of hope in a pocket of the country that’s a stronghold for extremism. In the last few years, an armed militia descended on a Black Lives Matter march in Sandpoint led by high schoolers, and a librarian in a nearby town was forced to resign after gun-toting local residents packed the library where she refused to censor books. People regularly drove past the house of the former Sandpoint mayor Shelby Rognstad, a relatively progressive politician, to hurl obscenities at his children; one of his sons escaped an attempted kidnapping, according to the family. The ultra-conservative Christ Church subjugates women – sometimes through sexual violence, as Vice reported in 2021 – and is steadily gaining ground in the region.
These are only a smattering of the examples that all add up to “a culture of silence” in north Idaho, Rognstad’s wife, Katherine Greenland, tells me.
The same fear-based politics dominate the state’s abortion ban, which begins at conception and subjects physicians to revoked medical licenses and felony convictions; OB-GYNs have since fled the state. The ban also allows family members, including those of rapists, to sue abortion providers; and attempts to criminalize helping minors get abortions outside the state without parental consent. Bills are on the table in the current legislative session to remove the rape and incest exception from the abortion ban, and redefine language in Idaho law from “fetus” to “preborn child”.
Recent Planned Parenthood polling shows that 65% of Idahoans believe that women should have access to all available reproductive healthcare options, including abortion, and 45% of Idahoans identify as pro-choice. But many people here are afraid to speak out, often for fear of literally being shot, an environment that makes it difficult to organize against far-right policies that endanger women.
“I’ve been in touch with a lot of reporters, and Idaho – north Idaho specifically – tends to be approached as something of a war zone,” Quintano says. “There’s a sense from the outside, and even in our community, that this is really dangerous work.”
Idaho’s abortion situation is extreme, but it isn’t isolated: In April, the US supreme court will consider whether Idaho’s near-total abortion ban violates the only federal protection for women needing emergency abortions, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (Emtala). Women in need of life-saving abortion care have been turned away from emergency rooms all over the country since Roe v Wade was overturned – and if the supreme court eviscerates Emtala, women with serious pregnancy complications will be at even greater risk. Anti-abortion groups are eager for a Trump win in November, which would give them a better shot at restricting abortion like Idaho did across the country (Trump himself reportedly wants a 16-week ban). But Quintano says that even in the strictest states, the future of reproductive rights shouldn’t be written off.
***
A year after that inaugural Pro-Voice Project performance in Sandpoint, Quintano drops her nine-year-old daughter off at school and settles in at her donated downtown office space. Though she raised over $30,000 last year in small donations, which she put toward the Pro-Voice Project’s eight community storytelling events in 2023, major funding hasn’t materialized. She’s been running mostly on passion and anger.
When the Dobbs decision overturning Roe came down from the supreme court in June 2022, Quintano was in the midst of drafting a memoir about being drugged and raped, part of an abusive relationship, and needing an abortion as a result of that relationship.
“I was writing on these themes of lack of agency, lack of voice, lack of autonomy, as a woman in this world,” she says. When she saw that same lack of agency institutionalized for an entire nation of women, “a massive amount of rage bubbled up”.
But there was nowhere to channel it into action in north Idaho. “I think probably all of us, when Dobbs happened, looked around and thought, ‘Someone’s got this, right? There are trained people who’ve been waiting for this to happen who will pick up the ball and run with it,’” she recalls. “But we were all just looking at each other.”
So Quintano picked up the ball, starting the Pro-Voice Project with the belief that public storytelling could make a difference even where legislated policy change seemed impossible. Then, in spring 2023, Bonner General hospital in Quintano’s hometown closed its labor and delivery ward, leaving 50,000 people in north Idaho without obstetrical care. (Idaho’s maternal mortality rate shot up 122% from 2019 to 2021; in 2023, Idaho disbanded the committee tasked with looking into the causes of maternal mortality.) National media and reproductive rights organizations reached out to her as the authority in the region, local women looked to her for leadership, and Quintano suddenly became a full-time activist.
To mourn the closing of Bonner General’s maternity ward, Quintano organized an UnHappy Hour at a local brewery in April. The day before the event, security footage captured a figure in camouflage casing the venue with a camera. She again ensured a local police presence, but she didn’t consider canceling. Nine years ago, when her home birth went awry, she had been rushed to Bonner General for an emergency C-section, without which she and her daughter might have died. Now women in her situation have to drive 45 miles to the nearest hospital or be helicoptered in an air ambulance.
Nearly 400 people packed the UnHappy Hour sharing Quintano’s sadness and anger. And again, nothing violent occurred.
The “UnHappy Hour” branding was pure Quintano, who meets fear and intimidation with dark wit: employing slogans like “Idaho is clit-erally the worst”, calling Sandpoint “one of the four horsemen of the women’s health apocalypse”, and offering funny facts to warm up crowds (“Did you know that Nasa asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons was enough for a week in space?”).
“This is an issue where people want to shut down because they’re afraid. Humor is a way to combat that, a way to open people up,” she says. “Plus, if we’re not laughing, we’re crying, and it’s not sustainable to feel like we’re being punched in the gut every day.”
While some of the stories people share through the Pro-Voice Project – about the agony of forced pregnancy, about miscarriages and being shamed by pharmacists for using birth control – can also feel like a punch in the gut, many of them are about the common reasons women and families seek abortions: financial insecurity, becoming pregnant despite taking every precaution, being trapped in abusive relationships.
Dr Amelia Huntsberger, one of the OB-GYNs who fled Idaho last year, and who is now an advisor to the Pro-Voice Project, says, “We can’t forget how powerful story is in making people understand complicated topics, and in changing hearts and minds. That’s Jen’s gift to Idaho, and beyond its borders.”
Storytelling about abortion is a tool used by both national and grassroots organizing groups, though its success is hard to quantify – it’s subversive by nature, Quintano says. But she does share a concrete example: in Sandpoint, people who were afraid even to say the word “abortion” have now told their stories, emboldening others to do the same.
Quintano won’t allow herself to burn out (even though she feels close lately, with all this unpaid labor). She’s playing the long game: while up to 13 other states will have abortion on the ballot this election cycle, there’s barely a murmur of a ballot initiative in Idaho. Quintano sees it as one of her end goals, but legal access to abortion is five or more years off for her state, she thinks. Step one is to make sure women don’t die, by convincing politicians to at least walk back the most egregious language of Idaho’s abortion ban.
***
After rushing from her office to lead a volunteer meeting and then to chat with an author working on a book about whisper networks, Quintano drives through the early dark of the Sandpoint winter to the home of one of her board members. Cynthia Dalsing is a retired nurse midwife, although she says that Idaho’s abortion laws have robbed her of a peaceful retirement. Quintano and Dalsing are hosting a viewing that evening of On the Brink, the recent Nightline episode on the impact of restrictive abortion laws across the country.
Quintano invited several people in the healthcare community to the viewing, both from private practices and Bonner General, which has gone largely silent on any aspect of women’s healthcare. Only two physicians show: psychiatrists, both young mothers themselves, who provide counseling to pregnant women and new mothers. They say they’ve stopped documenting in their notes when a patient expresses ambivalence or negative thoughts about pregnancy. Even though research shows forced pregnancy may lead to increased risk of suicide, these psychiatrists feel they can’t document any negative aspect of patients’ attitudes for fear that the state could pull such records and use them against patients.
Then another guest arrives: Jim Woodward, a Sandpoint Republican who served in the Idaho state senate from 2019-2022. He voted yes on all anti-abortion bills, but lost his seat in the 2022 election to Scott Herndon, a far-right abortion abolitionist who believes abortion should be treated as homicide and punished with jail time or even the death penalty. In the 2023 session, Herndon tried to remove Idaho’s rape and incest exception and called rape “an opportunity to have the child … if the rape actually occurred”. (Herndon declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Woodward is running to retake the seat this year. He says he and many other anti-abortion legislators didn’t foresee the ramifications of the bills they voted for. Part of his platform, which promises to reclaim his community from extremism, is to somewhat ease legislative language that doesn’t take the mother’s future health into account and calls for felony convictions for physicians. He didn’t hesitate to accept Quintano’s invitation to the viewing party. “We should be able to talk about all of these things, and do it in a nice way,” he says. Two days later, he shares stories from the Nightline episode with attendees at a campaign meet and greet.
This is what Quintano means about challenging people’s assumptions: otherwise, every newly outrageous development – like South Carolina Republicans’ push for legislation to execute a woman for having an abortion, or the Alabama supreme court’s ruling that frozen embryos are children – will further normalize the criminalization of abortion.
Such moves aren’t relegated to extremist pockets of the nation, either. “Idaho has been a frontrunner on a lot of other states’ abortion laws,” says Kelly O’Neill, Idaho litigation attorney with the organization Legal Voice and advisor for the Pro-Voice Project. “Even in a state where there are abortion protections right now, it might not be that way for ever. We can’t get complacent, and when people hear abortion stories from their next-door neighbor or their sister-in-law, or their son’s preschool teacher, it is a powerful way to remind people that politics are affecting you every day.”
Quintano has spoken about abortion in venues flying Confederate flags and been barred altogether from other engagements. The Pro-Voice Project just hosted a “rally for repro” at Bonner General and is gearing up to mark the “one-year anniversary of the loss of our OB-GYNs”. People still tell Quintano they don’t want to come to her storytelling performances for fear of violence. A full year into leading very public organizing efforts, though, she’s yet to see any major backlash.
“I don’t want to paint the picture that there’s no danger in speaking out,” she says. As her work gains visibility, she thinks it might attract harmful attention. “But if I can do this really publicly, with little in the way of blowback, then that means your average citizen has a lot of room to be safely vocal about their beliefs. If we are silenced, the other side has won.”
• In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
