Staying as Resistance, Speaking as Rebellion: Abortion Storytelling and Cultural Rewilding in Red America

Drawing on her work in North Idaho—one of post-Roe America’s most conservative landscapes—author and activist Jen Jackson Quintano explores abortion storytelling as an act of subversion. She shares how her work with The Pro-Voice Project uses narrative to disrupt stigma, mitigate fear, and spark unlikely conversations in communities shaped by Christian nationalism’s imposed morality. Drawing from her forthcoming book A Field Guide to Staying, she offers the Smith community a framework for using story as a means of cultural rewilding and for practicing rooted resistance in their own contested spaces.