Because of Wisconsin's abortion ban, one mother gave up trying for another child
The moment Kristen Petranek knew she would stop trying to get pregnant came in May, while lying on her couch in Madison, Wisconsin. That's when she saw the news pop up on her phone about a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
Petranek, 31, and her husband Daniel have two children – a 7-year-old son and 4-year-old daughter. Her pregnancies had been hard on her body, she says, and risky, because she is diabetic. But she and her husband still planned to have more kids – they wanted three. "I have three brothers and he has one brother – we kind of liked [a number] in the middle of that," she says.
After 10 long months of trying, Petranek got pregnant in March 2022. The whole family was thrilled. But at her first prenatal appointment, her doctor couldn't find a heartbeat. It was an early miscarriage.
Devastated, she went home to wait for the miscarriage to resolve. It was the second time she'd miscarried and she was anxious about possible complications. The days passed miserably, she says, as she suffered through nausea, extreme fatigue, abdominal pain and backaches. After a few days, she started to run a fever.
Resting under a heating pad, she tried to distract herself from the miscarriage by scrolling through Twitter, and that's when she saw the indicating that could imminently be
