6 OctOber 3 - 9, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents R yan Hamilton is used to standing in front of a crowd. He was a touring musician for years, making up half of two differ- ent Dallas duos. England was where he found his fans, so after leaving the music scene he accepted a gig as a radio host with the United Kingdom’s Jorvik Radio. He broadcasts his show from his rural North Texas home, highlighting throwback tunes by bands like Tripping Daisy, Third Eye Blind and Oasis. So, over the course of his life in the lime- light, he’d had experience with a hater or two. But nothing could have compared to the onslaught of hate he received after pub- licizing the details of his wife’s miscarriage, which nearly resulted in her death after she was denied care because of Texas’ abortion laws last spring. Hamilton has detailed the experience of finding his wife unconscious, bloody and near death in personal essays, TV interviews and on his podcast, CORRECT, which delves into the reproductive rights conver- sation with elected officials and medical professionals. With each CNN interview and podcast episode, Hamilton’s crowd be- comes bigger, and not everyone is a fan. He’s cemented himself as a leading male voice in the abortion access conversation and painted a target on his back for extreme con- servatives in one fell swoop. For every message of support in his so- cial media comments, there’s another calling Hamilton a liar, a political plant, an oppor- tunist. “I didn’t know it was rare for a man to speak up about this,” Hamilton told the Observer. “I handle [the hate] better now than I did at the beginning. There’s been a serious learning curve, because at first I was so an- gry I just wanted to fight back, and now my anger has direction and purpose.” During Au- gust’s Demo- cratic National Convention, Josh Zurawski, a Texas man whose wife devel- oped a life-threatening infection after she was denied abortion care, had a message for voters: “This isn’t just a woman’s fight,” Zurawski told the national audience. “We need to vote as if lives are depending on it, because they are.” Reproductive rights are center-stage this election season thanks to the 2022 Dobbs decision, which repealed Roe vs. Wade and allowed Texas and 13 other states to imple- ment a near-total abortion ban. While state lead- ers like Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton say the state law allows for excep- tions such as to preserve the life of the mother, abor- tion access advo- cates say the reality is this: Doc- tors are being threatened with fines, jail time and losing their li- censes if they don’t comply with an ambiguous law, and women are being directly harmed. And as more and more families experi- ence what Hamilton’s did — the death of a child who was wanted and the mother being turned away from the hospital until she, too, is nearly dead — more and more men are speaking out about abortion access. It’s a conversation that, until now, has been spear- headed by Texas women such as Wendy Da- vis, Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski. “Why are our wives and daughters and sisters expected to go out and relive their nightmares?” Hamilton said. “[In Texas], men are upset about the economy and immi- gration. Men do not talk about women’s re- productive rights, they consider it a women’s issue. What that says to me, and probably to the women in their lives, is that the lives of the women they love don’t mat- ter as much as the price of their groceries.” Reaching men who do not think abortion access or reproductive rights apply to them was a topic of conversation during the fifth episode of Hamilton’s podcast, which fea- tured U.S. Representative Colin Allred. Allred is campaigning for a Senate seat in November, and state polling shows him neck-and-neck with Republican incumbent Ted Cruz. Through consistent campaign messaging, Allred has been hammering the idea that he and Cruz have very little in com- mon, politically and personally. In the past, Cruz has been vocal about his support for stricter abortion bans, but he’s remained mostly silent in the last year | UNFAIR PARK | It seems like a cliche that in the past, [men] only started to speak up once they have a daughter or once it started to directly affect their personal situation… -Alex Clark “ ” >> p8 Men’s voices grow louder in Texas abortion access advocacy. By Emma Ruby
