Before It's a Tragedy

On March 22, 2020, Annie Sterle checked into the hospital to have the baby boy she had been waiting for her entire life. Hours later, she experienced an amniotic fluid embolism — one of the rarest, most catastrophic complications in all of obstetrics. Against all odds, somehow she survived. But she then spent 24 days separated from the son she nearly died giving birth to. The trauma that followed tested her, her husband, and their entire community in ways that went far beyond the physical.

It's impossible to hear Annie's story right now and not think about Lindsay Clancy — the Massachusetts mother and former labor and delivery nurse now on trial for killing her three young children in 2023. Her case has put the rare, severe condition of postpartum psychosis into the national spotlight. Whatever the jury ultimately decides about her case, it has forced a hard, necessary conversation about how pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period can break a person in ways our system still doesn't adequately screen for, treat, or catch until it's a tragedy instead of a diagnosis.

These are the high-profile cases. But the truth is that — because healthcare is inaccessible and unaffordable for so many families — most stories like these never get told at all.

This week's issue is full of examples of a system that waits for something to go wrong instead of building and sustaining the people and infrastructure to catch it early. Annie's full story is at the end — stay with me through this one.

Wisconsin’s state legislature has zero physicians in it. Zero. Not one person who has ever delivered a baby, called a family with a bad scan result, or sat with a patient while insurance decided whether her care was “medically necessary.” Dr. Gillian Battino spent more than 20 years as a radiologist in Wausau, Marshfield, and Madison. She’s a mother of six. And she’s running for Wisconsin’s 29th State Senate District, a race that was just named a top priority for 2026.

I sat down with Gillian for an honest conversation about what she saw in exam rooms that politicians never will. We talked about the crushing reality of medical debt, childcare costs, and housing prices that are quietly wrecking working families across Wisconsin, and how differently a state capitol might function with even one physician’s mindset at the table. We also talked about why rural healthcare access in Marathon County, and in nearly every county like it, keeps getting worse instead of better.

I want you to pay attention to this race. Gillian isn’t just running to add a physician’s voice to an empty bench. She’s running to unseat the sitting Republican senator, Cory Tomczyk, who is campaigning on the slogan “End Abortion Now.” He’s earned endorsements from Wisconsin Right to Life and the Pro-Life Wisconsin Victory Fund, and has said that Planned Parenthood shouldn’t receive any government funding.

If you’re in Wisconsin, or you know someone who is, watch the full conversation and think about what it would take to get her name in front of more voters — the people of Wisconsin need her at the table.

This week Dr. Chris Ford, Dr. Chelsea Daniels, Dr. Erin Stevens and I break down the biggest stories at the intersection of reproductive healthcare and politics — and for once, we get to start with good news. Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey signed a bill lifting restrictions on abortion at or after 24 weeks, making it one of the broadest laws in the country. We talk about why late abortion care — so often misunderstood by the public — really comes down to trusting physicians, patients, and families to navigate the countless shades of gray that arbitrary gestational limits simply can’t account for, and why putting that decision back in doctors’ hands actually saves lives.

From there we go to Idaho, where a federal judge ruled the state cannot enforce its near-total abortion ban against physicians who are acting to protect a patient’s health, not just her life. Chris walks through why that legal distinction matters clinically, drawing on his emergency medicine experience to explain how pregnancy complications can turn deadly within minutes.

Then it’s a tour of wins and losses across the map: Colorado becomes the fifth state requiring abortion medication access on college campuses. In Michigan, Oakland County votes to keep a Planned Parenthood clinic open with $1.5 million in local funding, maintaining a critical collaboration that provides basic healthcare — preventive care, contraception, STI testing, and more — for a vulnerable population that would otherwise go without. And Oklahoma delivers a gut punch, criminalizing possession of abortion-inducing drugs with penalties of up to ten years in prison.

We then widen the lens to the global fallout from the dissolution of USAID. Its collapse has cut off maternal health resources, contraception, and postpartum care to countries around the world. Maternal deaths are rising in places like Nigeria and Myanmar, and unsafe abortion rates are soaring in countries like Liberia, where contraception access has collapsed alongside U.S. funding.

And we close by taking aim at Senators Ron Johnson and Rand Paul. They recently resurfaced old, since-debunked texts from Dr. Fauci to falsely suggest a link between COVID vaccines and miscarriage. We talk about why weaponizing outdated science to scare pregnant patients does lasting damage to public trust in medicine and harms real women and babies.

As always: when it comes to healthcare, trust your providers, not politicians.

This week, Pat Kreitlow, Kate Duffy, Dan Shafer, and I dug into the primary post-mortem. We looked at why primary electorates skew fringe and WisGOP-endorsed candidates fell flat. We also covered the tight three-way 8th Congressional District primary and the Michelle Magadance Skinner (yes, that is her real name) dual-residency scandal in the Chippewa Valley Senate race. And we got into the fake polling “experiment” that surfaced right after the governor’s primary, plus how data centers are shaping up as a top-tier campaign issue heading into the general.

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Abortion bans are another reflection of the same pattern running through this whole issue. Instead of letting doctors treat a complication the moment it appears, bans force us to wait until a patient is sick enough, or close enough to dying, before the law lets us act. That’s a system built to catch tragedy after it happens instead of preventing it in the first place.

I’ve fought that system from nearly every angle there is: as an OB-GYN, an abortion provider, an advocate, a former candidate for Congress, and as a named physician plaintiff in the lawsuit that took down Wisconsin’s 1849 abortion ban and cleared the way for abortion care to resume in our state. On this episode of My Body. My Pod., Mini Timmaraju, one of the most respected and recognizable voices in the fight for abortion and reproductive healthcare, and I get into what it actually took to win that fight, and what’s possible when we organize to win back political power instead of just playing defense. And this episode got personal.

“This is about so much more than whether you can get an abortion in your state or not. It’s about health care. It’s about freedom. It’s about our ability to live our lives.”

We talk about why abortion access is essential to reproductive and maternal health, the real risks of pregnancy, delivery, and the postpartum period when politicians get between a patient and her doctor, and how organizing and elections are the only way to protect and expand that freedom before more families pay the price.

Two Instagram posts this week dug into just how unqualified and politically motivated the Trump administration’s picks for federal leadership really are: Darlene Graham and Dr. Heidi Overton.

Graham was appointed to fill the Senate seat of her brother — Lindsey Graham — after he died unexpectedly, and she’s now running for the full term in a primary runoff this Tuesday. Last week she said publicly that she is “not that informed on national security.” That’s a jaw-dropping admission for someone asking voters to hand her a six-year term, and it raises the obvious question of whether she’s actually qualified for the job or just another Trump loyalist along for the ride.

The Heidi Overton nomination is the one that should worry every person reading this. She’s up to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as commissioner — the top job at the agency — at a moment when the FDA is genuinely struggling to protect the people it’s supposed to serve.

The FDA has already logged more than 300 food recalls in 2026. That includes a cyclospora outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce that’s grown to nearly 11,000 illnesses and two deaths — the largest outbreak of its kind on record — plus a salmonella outbreak from jalapeños that’s sickened over 300 people and a deadly E. coli scare in frozen blueberries.

Meanwhile, the FDA and CDC have lost more than 7,000 staff combined since January 2025. That includes 65% of the support staff who coordinate inspectors’ travel and logistics — the people one FDA inspector called “America’s first line of defense” for food and drug safety. The FDA’s own budget proposal would cut food-testing lab capacity by more than half. Experts are careful to say not every outbreak traces directly back to a single policy decision, but they agree the gutting of food safety infrastructure raises real risk going forward.

It’s the same pattern of waiting for a tragedy instead of preventing one that runs through everything else in this issue.

Overton has said, “We need publications in academic journals that are conservative based.” But science isn’t conservative or liberal — it’s just science, and it stops being trustworthy the moment it’s asked to confirm a predetermined political conclusion instead of following the evidence. Handing the FDA commissioner role to someone chosen for political loyalty rather than public health expertise — at the exact moment the agency needs rebuilding — isn’t a paperwork problem. It’s the safety of every meal families feed their kids.

As an OB-GYN, I’ve trained and drilled on managing amniotic fluid embolism, or AFE. It’s one of the rarest and most unpredictable emergencies in obstetrics, striking somewhere between 2 and 8 out of every 100,000 deliveries. Even with modern critical care, the mortality rate can run as high as 60 percent, and it remains one of the leading causes of maternal death in the U.S. There’s still no definitive test for it. Doctors diagnose it by ruling everything else out, in real time, while a patient is crashing in front of them. I had heard Annie’s story firsthand from my colleague who saved her life, long before Annie and I ever met. Hearing it directly from her was something else entirely.

We talk about what actually happened in that delivery room, and what the long road back looked like — physically and emotionally — for her whole family. We talk about the bond between a mother and a baby interrupted by catastrophe, and what it took for Annie and her son to find their way back to each other.

Annie didn’t just survive AFE. She turned it into advocacy. And she’s spent the years since screening her documentary, 24 Days Without You, at hospitals, nursing schools, and grand rounds across the country, teaching the very providers who might one day treat someone like her.

Next week is going to be a little bit of a football edition. I’m sitting down with Attorney General Josh Kaul, a former high school fullback who has spent his career blocking like a hall-of-famer for the people of Wisconsin. I also caught up with David Crowley, the Democratic candidate for Wisconsin governor, at iconic Lambeau Field. You’ll have no trouble guessing his favorite Packer player (it’s Jordan Love), though the most substantial part of our conversation involves his plans for healthcare, easing the affordability crisis, and yes, his take on data centers. And then we go full Green Bay Packers with Outagamie County Supervisor Tom Nelson, who wrote a new book that explains exactly why this team — and this state — are so unlike anything else. IYKYK.

Until then, follow along here:

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