Jen Jackson Quintano is her region’s only abortion rights organizer. Faced with a ‘culture of silence’, she’s platforming women – and changing minds

Last January, Jen Jackson Quintano stepped into a theater in Sandpoint, a tiny city in northern Idaho, to debut a production that could best be described as The Vagina Monologues meets The Moth – a night of Idahoans sharing stories about their own reproductive agency.

Quintano was nervous. Idaho, where Republicans outnumber Democrats five to one, has one of the most punitive abortion bans in the country. Further, Quintano lives in a region of the state that keeps making national headlines for bold displays of armed intimidation by militia, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists. This was not necessarily a safe place to talk about abortion.

So that afternoon, as people began filing into the theater, she considered worst-case scenarios – even though she’d promoted the event mostly by word of mouth to avoid alerting disruptors, ensured law enforcement had patrols in the area, and brought in a peacekeeper force of local volunteers trained in de-escalation tactics. One attendee, wearing high heels, stashed sneakers in her bag in case she had to run. Another kept her coat on and her purse on her shoulder for a hasty exit.

Quintano wasn’t a full-time activist; she’d pulled this event together in her spare time between running a chainsaw and driving one-ton trucks for her family’s arborist business. She empathized with attendees’ apprehension: “My husband had volunteered as a peacekeeper, my mother-in-law was in the audience, we were all there. And I had this morbid thought: what is my daughter left with if shit goes down?”