Still Standing

250 years in. The fight is not over — and neither are we.

If you’re new here — welcome. I’m so glad you found your way.

Many of you joined this community through my congressional race in Wisconsin’s 8th District in 2024. That campaign was always about something bigger than a seat in Congress. It was about our rights. Our freedoms. Our democracy. And the role that healthcare — and this state — have to play in defending all of it.

I didn’t win that race. But I haven’t stopped working.

Since then, I’ve been serving as Board Chair of the Committee to Protect Health Care, on the Executive Board of ACOG, and collaborating with some of the most influential and exciting voices in independent progressive media. Here in Wisconsin, I’ve been working alongside Democrats running up and down the ballot, because the fight didn’t end on election night. It just shifted, and now we have every reason to have high hopes for November.

This newsletter is where I bring it all together. Healthcare, politics, reproductive rights, Wisconsin — and the people doing the work that matters. I’m glad you’re here for it.

Now — back to business.

I have been thinking about what it means that this is the Semiquincentennial — 250 years since the United States declared its independence. I was six years old for the Bicentennial, and I remember it. The joy. The sense of shared purpose. Neighbors in community. A country celebrating itself together, flawed as it was, reaching toward something better.

This one feels different.

We are marking 250 years while living under a government that has declared war on its own people — gutting Medicaid, attacking reproductive freedom, dismantling the institutions that protect us. HR1 (the “Big Beautiful Bill”) passed a year ago on July 4. Most of us haven’t felt its worst impacts yet. We will.

And yet.

I keep coming back to what the Fourth of July actually is: not a celebration of perfection, but a declaration of intention. A promise that this country made to itself — about rights, about freedom, about the radical idea that government exists to serve the people, not the other way around.

That promise has never been kept perfectly. It has always required people who refused to look away. People who kept working. People like us.

So yes, this year is hard. And yes, we keep going. Because this work matters.

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One Text. Four Years Later.

This week, a post I shared on Instagram stopped people in their tracks. It’s a text message I received from a friend right after the Dobbs decision — she was reaching out on behalf of someone she loved, terrified about what the overturning of Roe meant in practice.

Her friend had a high-risk pregnancy. And she was scared: scared that if something went wrong, her doctor would be forced to choose the baby over the mother. Scared that a medical intervention could be labeled a “late abortion” and that her friend could face legal consequences.

This is not a hypothetical. This is what Dobbs did: it injected fear and confusion into the most vulnerable moments of a person’s life.

The post went viral, which tells you something: people are living with fear like this quietly, and they need to know they are not alone.

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Fixing What They Broke

This week’s guest on The Dr. Kristin Lyerly Show is someone who has spent her career fixing what they broke, and now she’s asking Wisconsin voters to let her do it from a different perch.

Wisconsin Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski sat down with me to talk about the legacy of Dobbs four years in, the Constitutional offices Republicans hollowed out, and why she chose Lieutenant Governor over the top seat. We covered affordability, Medicaid, the Republican betrayal of Wisconsin families, and what a Democratic trifecta actually means for this state.

Oh, and her 6-year-old son Hartley crashed the interview and gave us a genuine boy mom moment you are absolutely going to want to see.

And next week? Keep your eyes peeled! Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez sits down with me — and since she’s a nurse and I’m a doctor, we really get into it on healthcare. She’s sharp about what sets her apart in the governor’s race, and she is unambiguous about the threat Tom Tiffany poses to Wisconsin women and families. This is a must-see. More soon.

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A Hangnail. Sure.

This week on The Situation Womb, Dr. Erin Stevens and I had an absolute blast — and covered some genuinely infuriating ground.

Four years after Dobbs, the attacks on reproductive healthcare aren’t slowing down. They’re just getting sneakier. We broke down the Trump administration’s latest push to funnel vulnerable pregnant people into unregulated crisis pregnancy centers, why abortion numbers have actually gone up since Dobbs (yes, really), what the push to criminalize patients actually means, and why the courts may be our most important battleground right now.

A Texas senator compared a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy to a hangnail. We absolutely had thoughts.

Oh — and Olivia Rodrigo is hosting a very special concert later this year to uplift women and girls in creative and necessary ways, and we have the details.

What do you want us to take on next in The Situation Womb? We’re listening!

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Milwaukee in Summer

Before I go, because we do not do this work without also feeding our souls…

This week I got some rare and precious time with my boys. We sweated through a hot and steamy Brewers game (we won), then headed to Summerfest — the World’s Largest Music Festival — right there on the Milwaukee lakefront. We caught an absolutely outstanding set from Ax and the Hatchetmen (remember that name), took in a little old school Spoon, bumped into the Brewers Racing Sausages on the midway, and just... breathed.

Milwaukee is a city of festivals, from neighborhood celebrations to the Wisconsin State Fair, which will be celebrating 175 years in August. In the summer, there is no place like it.

This is why we keep going. For all of it — the rights, the democracy, the Brewers wins, the late-night festival moments with your kids. All of it matters. None of it is guaranteed. And all of it is worth defending.

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Next week is going to be a busy one — follow along here! Substack, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, Facebook, Bluesky, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Kristin