Maria Magner was six months pregnant with her second child when a seizure led to the discovery of a brain tumor. Given that she was well into her third trimester, her medical team was hesitant to begin the aggressive treatment needed, but she eventually started chemotherapy, had a successful surgery and underwent radiation. She is now in remission and her daughter is healthy.
That was three years ago, before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and Iowa enacted one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the nation, creating new complications for doctors treating pregnant women who face medical emergencies.
Now, Ms. Magner, a registered independent who grew up in a heavily G.O.P.-leaning family, is going door to door in the competitive Third Congressional District telling her story and trying to persuade her neighbors to vote out Representative Zach Nunn, the Republican incumbent, and elect Democrats up and down the ticket.
“If that were me today I wouldn’t be alive,” Ms. Magner said in an interview. She has never gotten involved in politics, she added, but she is volunteering this year because “I just felt like I should do something. Even if it doesn’t work, I can tell my girls that I tried.”
In a state where Republicans hold all four congressional seats, Democrats are banking on voters like Ms. Magner to bolster their chances of picking off G.O.P. incumbents in a pair of competitive districts in the southern part of the state, as they push to win the House majority in November.
At campaign stops and canvassing events and in television ads, they are hoping to harness a backlash to a law that took effect in Iowa in July banning most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy to target Republican incumbents who have opposed abortion rights. In addition to Mr. Nunn, who once said he believed that all abortions should be illegal in the United States, they are targeting Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who in her first term in Congress cosponsored a bill that would effectively outlaw abortions by giving embryos constitutional rights.
“A lot of people thought this would never happen in Iowa, but now we have one of the strictest bans in the country,” said Christina Bohannan, who is challenging Ms. Miller-Meeks in Iowa’s First Congressional District. “It is a huge issue because we had in Iowa a very balanced law for a long time.”
Ms. Bohannan, who lost to Ms. Miller-Meeks in 2022 by more than 20,000 votes, focused her first campaign ad this year on attacking the congresswoman on abortion rights.
“Iowa now has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country because of Mariannette Miller-Meeks,” she says in the spot. The congresswoman had no direct involvement in the statewide law, but the ad alludes to Ms. Miller-Meeks’s cosponsorship in 2021 of the Life at Conception Act, a bill that would grant legal personhood to fertilized eggs, effectively criminalizing abortions without any exceptions for rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
Ms. Miller-Meeks, who has yet to sign on to the bill during this Congress, said in an interview this month that she had backed it initially only because she assumed she could make changes. She is one of dozens of vulnerable Republican lawmakers who have backed away from the measure following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, when the specter of a federal abortion ban became a major political liability for the G.O.P.
The ruling boosted their party in the 2022 midterm elections, and Democrats hope that the reaction against it — and to Iowa’s own severe abortion restrictions — will spur turnout among moderate and independent voters and convince them that sending Democrats to Washington is the only way to change course.
Ms. Miller-Meeks, who has sought to refocus the political conversation around contraception instead of her anti-abortion rights position, says that overturning Roe has brought the issue closer to home, where voters “are closer to the people that they elected to represent.”
“The best way to prevent abortion is to prevent pregnancy to begin with, making sure women have the proper tools and are empowered to be able to get pregnant on their timelines,” she said during an interview in which she spoke about legislation she has sponsored that is billed as increasing access to contraception.
Critics contend that the measure, which would direct the Food and Drug Administration to issue guidance for companies that want to make oral contraception available without prescriptions, would have little practical effect. The agency has already approved one such drug and is in the process of reviewing another.
The Democrats running to unseat Ms. Miller-Meeks and Mr. Nunn have tried to tie them not just to the state’s strict abortion law, but also to a statewide book ban and Iowa’s decision to reject federal aid for summer food programs.
Even though Congress had nothing to do with those measures, Lanon Baccam, the Democrat who is challenging Mr. Nunn, and Ms. Bohannan maintain that dissatisfaction with conservative policies at the state level will translate into a rejection of Republicans up and down the ballot.
“Iowans are just fed up with this Republican regime and they’re ready for change,” Mr. Baccam, an Army veteran and former federal Agriculture Department official, said in an interview.
Mr. Baccam and Democrats have run a series of ads showing a moment from a 2022 Republican primary debate in which Mr. Nunn raised his hand after a moderator asked who would answer yes to the question “Should all abortions be illegal in this country?”
Mr. Nunn’s campaign says the clip distorts his stance, and accuses Democrats of “intentionally misleading Iowa voters.” He has since clarified that he believes in exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother — which are also included in Iowa’s law.
The Republicans have toiled to shift the campaign conversation to economic issues, asking small-business owners, working-class families and farmers whether they feel their lives have improved under President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.
The answer, they said, has been a frequent and resounding no.
“People are very concerned about the economy, and they know that there was a difference from 2020 and then after 2020,” Ms. Miller-Meeks said between campaign stops this month in Keokuk and Mount Pleasant. “And those prices are a direct reflection of the Biden-Harris administration.”
Mr. Nunn, who serves in the Air Force Reserve, has worked to appeal to voters across party lines. He often touts an effort he led to expand parental-leave benefits for members of the military serving in Reserve or National Guard positions, as well as a bill he helped push to enactment that boosted low-income housing developments in rural parts of the country.
“The overwhelming challenge here is going to be able to win cross-party voters,” Mr. Nunn said. “It’s the largest segment of the voting electorate.”
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