On March 10, this Ky. senator made a speech on abortion. Ten days later, she’s famous.
Kentucky Sen. Karen Berg, D-Louisville, didn’t wake up on Monday to find herself famous.
At 60, she says, she’s not much for social media, so it was up to her kids to tell her that a speech she made in a Senate committee meeting on abortion on March 1 had gone viral across Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, sending her name and impassioned words across the stratosphere. She was lauded by Patton Oswalt, retweeted by Padma Lakshmi and Joy Reid, touted by Sarah Silverman. She did love the retweet from actor Bradley Whitford who played Josh on The West Wing a while back because she recognized him.
“Since my goal in life is to make my kids proud of me, I’m very happy,” she said in a telephone interview on Monday.
But what impressed her the most about social media’s enormous reach was the hundreds of emails and messages she got from ordinary women.
“They were emails telling me about their mother’s botched abortion, their aunt’s botched abortions; they were begging, begging begging that we do not go back there.”
“Back there” is what Kentucky and the rest of the U.S. right wing is racing towards, a world where Roe v. Wade is struck down by the current Supreme Court, leaving states to determine whether women can still get a safe and legal abortion. Kentucky’s GOP supermajority has already decided no; it has a trigger law in place, along with an omnibus House Bill 3 that if passed would probably close the last two clinics left in the state that still perform abortions. Berg’s speech was about Senate Bill 321, which would prohibit abortions after 15 weeks. It appeared before the Judiciary Committee, where Berg pointed out, she is the only woman and only doctor on the committee. Not just any doctor either, but a diagnostic radiologist who has looked at a whole lot of fetal ultrasounds.
One of the reasons her speech resonated with so many people was that Berg issued a lot of facts in response to a lot of lies about abortion. “For you to sit here and say that at 15 weeks a fetus has a functional heart, a four chamber heart, that can survive on its own is fallacious. That is not true. There is no viability.”
She called the bill a medical sham, and then, her voice quivering with anger said: “For each and every one of my colleagues to be so willing to pass an aye vote when what you are doing is putting your finger, putting your knee, putting a gun to women’s heads ... You are killing women because abortion will continue. Women will continue to have efficacy over their body whether or not you make it legal.”
In a weekend, Berg went from a few thousand followers on Twitter to almost 54,000. It’s helped her campaign coffers, too.
She’s only been in the legislature for two years. She mostly retired in 2018 and ran against Sen. Ernie Harris in the 26th District, some of northeast Louisville and all of Oldham County. She won the primary but lost to Harris. Then in 2020, he resigned and she won a special election.
She thinks she won the election because she’s socially liberal and fiscally conservative. She’s lived in Louisville her whole life, still lives in the same house she was brought home to from the hospital. But she was also raised by a doctor father, “I was raised in a home where I was taught the dangers of back street abortions, and I have seen what it looks like when a woman comes in overwhelmingly septic from a botched abortion,” she said.
Frankfort has been, well, interesting. As the only Jewish member of the General Assembly, she’s had some moments listening to anti-Semitic jokes and a distinctly less funny ramble by one member about Jews, Nazis and poison gas. “I’ve had to speak against some really really dangerous bills this session and I’ve realized honestly that I have trouble controlling my emotions sometimes,” she said. THE speech, however, “my whole life has been in my head.”
Twitter followers won’t change the votes in the next few weeks, but it might get more outside help to elect more Democrats and more women.
“That is without question what I think we need to be doing — we need to get voices of people affected by this,” she said. “If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one, I will support your right to have that child and raise it, but that doesn’t mean you can force your decision on other women. They have advocacy over their own body.
“What I want to say is this: If nothing else, people are listening, people care about this issue and not just women, I’ve had a lot of men reach out to me this weekend. We need safe, legal abortion — we can’t have women in desperate situations out on the street by themselves to be literally slaughtered over something that should be their decision to make.”
This story was originally published March 21, 2022 at 2:46 PM.
