Ilyse Hogue


Ilyse Hogue is an American progressive activist who has served as president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, a reproductive rights lobbying and advocacy organization, since 2013.

Early years

Hogue was born in Dallas, Texas in August 1969. Her family is Jewish. She graduated from high school at Greenhill School in Addison, Texas before attending Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she studied environmental sciences. She attended graduate school at the University of Michigan and then later worked as a research assistant at the University of Montana. At Vassar, she engaged in her first political work in April 1989 when she joined the March for Women's Lives, a demonstration focused on reproductive rights.

Career

Hogue joined NARAL in January 2013. When assuming the role of president, some commentators remarked on her relative youth compared to her sexagenarian predecessor as an intentional choice on the part of NARAL as it sought to bring a more aggressive approach to defending abortion rights and courting younger supporters.
One of her first moves as president was to build coalitions within the progressive movement with groups that traditionally had little to do with reproductive rights. She has also brought an increased focus on ballot measures, partly in an attempt to force opponents to define what they are in favor of while giving Americans who support abortion rights a platform.
Following a shooting which occurred at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado in 2015, The Huffington Post reported on a Facebook post of Hogue's in which she was critical of the rhetoric of anti-abortion activists including David Daleiden and Troy Newman.
Prior to her work for NARAL, Hogue worked for MoveOn.org, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Media Matters for America, and the Friends of Democracy PAC, a campaign-finance reform group founded by Jonathan Soros. She serves on the board of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice, a Jewish social organization.
On November 15, 2016, Hogue announced she was considering running in the Democratic National Committee chairmanship election, 2017. She ultimately decided not to enter the race.

Personal life

She is married to John Neffinger with whom she had twins in 2015.
Per her online video she declared “I’m Ilyse Hogue. I’m the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, which I might not be if I hadn’t had access to a legal abortion twenty years ago when I got pregnant due to a contraception failure. I always say my abortion story is boring. I got pregnant, I wasn’t ready to be a parent, I wasn’t with the person I wanted to be with for the rest of my life, we weren’t financially secure, we both had dreams that we wanted to go on and achieve.“