Raleigh, NC – Today, State Senator and NC-13 Congressional candidate Wiley Nickel held a pro-choice press conference to highlighted the threats facing reproductive rights in North Carolina and around the country. Other speakers - Commissioner Cervania, Storie, and Siyona - shared their personal stories and experience with reproductive rights in North Carolina.

“I want my daughter, Adeline, to grow up in a country with the same rights that her mother has had for the last 50 years. Her grandmother, my mother, knew what a pre-Roe world looked like. I do not want my daughter to experience that same world post-Roe,” Senator Nickel said at the press conference. “Voters are overwhelmingly looking for leaders who will fight to protect their rights, not take them away. I’ll fight with every ounce of my energy to protect every woman’s right to choose.”

“Because of the Supreme Court, women no longer have the power over their own bodies, lives and freedoms. No judge, and no politician, should ever be in a position to block personal medical decisions,” Commissioner Cervania said at the press conference. “As a woman of middle age and older, I got pregnant and had two miscarriages. And if I left the fetal tissue in my body without doing medical intervention that in many politicians viewpoint was an abortion, I would have died.”

“I don’t know what the world before Roe looked like. And I’m grateful to the leaders and activists who came before me to make abortion care accessible in our nation,” Siyona, an NC State student, said at the press conference. “Now, thanks to extremists like Bo Hines, I do know what the world looks like after Roe. I don’t want that to be the world young women like me have to grow up in and raise families in.”

“I’m a law student, an organizer, and a woman who had an abortion. I’ve been pro-choice for my entire life. But I never understood how difficult that choice is until I made it,” Storie said at the press conference. “I know it is a choice only I could’ve made, that will impact me for the rest of my life, that allowed me to be here with you all today.”

Wiley Nickel is running for Congress against far-right extremist Bo Hines, who would be a rubber stamp on Republicans’ proposal to ban abortion nationwide.

Bo Hines is the subject of a now-viral tweet calling him out for his latest proposal on abortion access. Hines - who has scrubbed his 100% pro-life rating from his website - told WRAL said that he “wants victims of rape and incest to be allowed to get an abortion on a case-by-case basis through a community-level review process outside the jurisdiction of the federal government.”

Last week, Planned Parenthood responded to Hines’ latest comment, saying, “This outrageous and extreme position on reproductive rights demonstrates just how dangerous Bo Hines is for the people of North Carolina’s 13th district. If elected, Bo Hines and his anti-abortion allies would push a harmful agenda in DC that could put politicians in charge of people’s freedom and health care decisions across the country.”