Her first response was to inform her husband they wanted to instantly transfer out of Louisiana. Her second response was deciding to remain and run for Congress as an alternative. This week she launched a campaign ad not like any I’ve ever seen.
“I’m Katie Darling, and I live on a farm in St. Tammany Parish,” begins the ad, with Darling talking over pictures of her husband and her daughter tending to their chickens. She introduces her being pregnant with a close-up on her rotund stomach, saying, “and there’s someone else who is going to be joining us.” As Darling criticizes Louisiana’s strict abortion ban — “We should be putting pregnant women at ease,” she says — Darling and her husband are proven driving to the hospital. Darling is subsequent seen in a hospital mattress; close-ups of her grimacing face make it obvious she is in labor.
We see an IV drip, and watch as she clutches the mattress rails and a physician steps to the tip of the birthing mattress. Finally, we watch as, seemingly topless, Darling lays again in mattress working towards skin-to-skin contact with her just-born son. In the ultimate seconds of the ad, Darling sits up in her hospital mattress, nonetheless topless and showing to nurse, and says she is working for Congress to create a higher world “for him.” She’s referring to her son, however she additionally appears to be making the purpose that entry to abortion care can profit all Americans and American households, not simply girls.
My dialog with Darling occurred simply two hours after the ad had been launched, and it had already gone viral. Many feminine pals had despatched it to me. Darling defined that she’d wished to indicate that the narrative “that abortion is anti-child or anti-family is not true.” That it’s attainable to be a devoted mom and nonetheless deeply help abortion entry, and that antiabortion activists shouldn’t be allowed to nook the market on household values.
Her resolution to run for Congress slightly than flee Louisiana, she stated, was grounded in her realization that, “If we don’t codify Roe, there won’t be anywhere in the country we could go that’s safe.”
Darling’s possibilities of successful are, frankly, small. The district through which she’s working is represented by Steve Scalise, the Republican House minority whip, who has held the seat for 14 years. In 2020 he received reelection with 72 p.c of the vote.
But Darling’s possibilities apart, that is a exceptional ad. As a style, campaign advertisements have a tendency towards the masculine, even those making an attempt to spice up feminine candidates (I’m taking a look at you, Lauren Boebert and Amy McGrath). In normal, candidates appear decided to persuade voters they will muscle Washington into submission. So they air spots the place they’re chopping wooden, placing out fires, revving their engines. In 2022, candidates have depicted themselves as shooting-range aficionados, or confirmed up because the gun-twirling sheriff in an ad styled as Western. One Georgia candidate’s campaign ad featured himself capturing at a wheelbarrow filled with paper within the forest. (The paper represented “Nancy Pelosi’s Plan for America.”)
Katie Darling’s ad is about energy of a completely different sort. Her ad positions motherhood as its personal type of qualifying toughness, and childbirth as the unique flex. In one shot, her husband sits on the hospital room couch, head bowed. He is there to help her, however ultimately, that is a feat of energy that solely she will be able to carry out. The ad is directly tender and agonizing, intimate and common, anxious and peaceable.
Darling informed me that responses to her ad had been flooding in, and “99 percent of them” had been optimistic. The few that had been detrimental had been from individuals who argued that she was displaying one thing too private and intimate. That, Darling informed me, was additionally a part of her level: Pregnancy and childbirth are intimate experiences, finest left to the purview of pregnant individuals and medical doctors slightly than to legislative our bodies.
While watching this ad, what I stored coming again to was the idea of experience. Who is certified to legislate sure points, and what’s the nature of their qualification? The messaging implicit in Darling’s ad is that, not solely have her experiences as a just lately pregnant girl knowledgeable her opinions about abortion rights, however they’ve additionally made her uniquely skilled and certified to have these opinions to start with.
No matter the end result of Katie Darling’s race, individuals will and must be being attentive to how this ad was constructed and what it means. It stands in stark aid to the gun-shooting, wheelbarrow pushing, wood-chopping, play-acting candidates. She appears to be like like a mom, and they appear like little children.