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When Roe v. Wade was overruled in June, Katie Darling, an account executive for a Louisiana IT company, was seven months pregnant. Her pregnancy was deemed high-risk, and she was concerned that if something went wrong, “my physicians wouldn’t know what sort of treatment they were allowed to provide me,” she told me on Monday.
Her first instinct was to inform her husband that they needed to leave Louisiana right away. Her second reaction was to stay and run for office in Congress. This week, she debuted a campaign advertisement unlike any I’ve ever seen.”My name is Katie Darling, and I live on a farm in St. Tammany Parish,” Darling says over shots of her husband and daughter tending to their poultry.
She announces her pregnancy with a close-up of her chubby belly and the words, “and there’s someone more who will be joining us.” Darling and her husband are shown heading to the hospital as she laments Louisiana’s severe abortion restriction – “We should be putting pregnant ladies at peace,” she says. Darling is then seen in a hospital bed, with close-ups of her grimacing face indicating she is in labor.
We see an IV drip and observe her clutching the bed rails as a doctor approaches the end of the birthing bed. Finally, we witness Darling lying back in bed, ostensibly topless, practicing skin-to-skin contact with her newborn boy. Darling sits up in her hospital bed, still topless and appearing to nurse, in the last seconds of the video and says she’s running for Congress to make the world a better place “for him.” She’s talking to her son, but she also appears to be implying that access to abortion care can help all Americans and families, not just women.
My conversation with Darling took place only two hours after the advertisement was launched, and it had already gone viral. Many female friends had forwarded it to me. Darling stated that she wanted to demonstrate that the idea “that abortion is anti-child or anti-family is false.” That it is possible to be a dedicated mother while also strongly supporting abortion access, and those anti-abortion campaigners should not have a monopoly on family values.
Her choice to run for Congress rather than depart Louisiana was based on her realization that “if we don’t codify Roe, there won’t be anywhere in the country we could go that’s secure,” she said. Let’s talk about maternal gore, Hesse. Darling’s chances of winning are, to put it mildly, slim. Steve Scalise, the Republican House minority whip, has represented the district in which she is running for 14 years. He was re-elected with 72 percent of the vote in 2020.
Aside from Darling’s possibilities, this is an outstanding advertisement. Even those attempting to support female candidates (I’m looking at you, Lauren Boebert, and Amy McGrath) tend to be macho as a genre. In general, candidates appear intent on convincing voters that they can bully Washington into submission. So they fly over areas where people are chopping wood, putting out fires, and revving their motors.
In 2022, contenders portrayed themselves as shooting-range enthusiasts or as the gun-twirling sheriff in a Western-themed advertisement. One Georgia candidate’s campaign advertisement depicted him shooting at a wheelbarrow load of paper in the woods. (The document was titled “Nancy Pelosi’s Plan for America.”)
Katie Darling’s commercial is about a different sort of strength. Her advertisement portrays motherhood as its own type of qualifying toughness, with delivery as the first flex. In one scene, her spouse sits on the hospital couch with his head bent. He is there to assist her, yet this is a feat of strength that only she can do. The advertisement is both tender and agonizing, individual yet global, apprehensive and serene.
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