Could abortion rights and “fixing the damn roads” take Michigan’s governor to the White House?
Gretchen Whitmer was the minority leader in the Michigan state senate when she made the move that catapulted her to national attention. An anti-abortion group had collected some 300,000 signatures backing a law intended to make women buy a separate “rider”, or policy, if they wanted their health insurance to cover abortion.
The signatures were enough to force a statewide referendum—but the Republican Party, which then held the state governorship and both houses of the legislature, saw no need for that. They chose instead just to pass it into law.
During the debate on the state senate floor, Ms Whitmer, then 42 and 12 years into her political career, argued the measure would be tantamount to forcing women to buy “rape insurance”.
She pointed out that in a referendum it would surely be rejected, and so its passage was undemocratic. Then she paused. “I am about to tell you something that I have not shared with many people in my life. But over 20 years ago I was a victim of rape,” she said, her voice cracking. “I thought this was all behind me. You know how tough I can be. The thought and the memory of that still haunts me.”
She demanded that Republicans “at least let the people of this state have a vote on this. Let the people of Michigan decide.”
Ms Whitmer’s speech did not change a single Republican vote. But she would in the end get her way. A decade later, to the day, Ms Whitmer, by then governor, appeared again on the senate floor, to announce a package of laws she had signed expanding abortion rights, including one which repealed the insurance-rider requirement.
In a new book, “True Gretch: What I’ve Learned About Life, Leadership and Everything In Between”, Ms Whitmer writes that for years she had “wanted to ignore the terrible event that happened to me in college. But now I recognise that it also helped to make me who I am: a woman who’s willing to fight, and not inclined to give up.”
