Having a kid at 15 and more straight talk from ‘The AOC of Iowa’

2/4/2026

Early into the first speech I heard her give, Stephanie Steiner said she had a child at age 15.

It’s defining in many ways for Steiner, an Iowa Democratic congressional candidate who would go on to have six more kids, battle her way through a truant and self-described wayward childhood in Alabama and Iowa to success as a caregiver — a neonatal nurse and, first and always, a mother who in a recent interview was reached while helping one of her kids change a tire on a remote rural road in northwest Iowa near her home in Sutherland. On another call, she was beside a sick kid with a stubborn stomach problem. That daughter is fine now.

“My life has been spent taking care of people. That’s what I do,” Steiner said. “And, I love it.”

One of the rules of engagement in contemporary American cultural discussion involving identity is this: if you are it, you can say it — or at least talk about it.

Steiner and I are not the same, but we are both formed from one of the more challenging decisions a human being can make: what to do with an unwanted child?

I’m adopted, the product of a teenage mother who made a different decision than Steiner. She gave me up. I’m at once thankful and bitter for it, and I was up front with Steiner, telling her just that when I talked to her about her frame of mind when she learned of her own pregnancy early in her teen years.

“I was 15 when I had my first kid,” Steiner said in an interview. “You just do it. You just do it.”

Steiner, now 44, would have four kids by the time she was 21. Seven total biologically. And three more in step fashion through her second marriage to Mark Steiner Sr., a welding supervisor, who, along with Stephanie, manages a 10-acre goat farm in O’Brien County near the South Dakota border.

A candidate who supports women’s reproductive rights, Steiner didn’t have an internal struggle with what to do herself — at age 15 — with an unexpected pregnancy.

Abortion was not an option, she said.

“When I had my first child at 15, I never considered it,” she said.

“I’m personally pro-life,” Steiner said. “I chose not to have an abortion. I’m glad I had that choice. And, I support women that had abortions as well because it is personal to them.”

She added, “It’s like this: I love my kids. And that was the choice I made. I think everybody deserves to make their own choice. I’m not saying it was the easiest thing, but it has been very rewarding.”

Steiner spoke at an Iowa event with one of her political heroes, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, shortly after announcing her campaign in the state’s sweeping 4th Congressional District. For her part, Steiner didn’t demure when I suggested she might very well be “The AOC of Iowa” — a reference to the straight-talking Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York who has a rare and authentic connectivity with working people, one earned through shifts as a bartender and the relatability of making a living through sweaty routines.

Is Stephanie Steiner “The AOC of Iowa?”

“That’s my hope, yeah,” Steiner said. “I know what it means to be an everyday Iowan. I lived it. It is my lived experience. I share these lived experiences.”

A native of Athens, Alabama, who speaks with a decided Southern lilt and sports tattoos and peppers her speech with anecdotes of a hardscrabble upbringing, a life of full houses of kids and frugal cupboards, Steiner can summon the earned working-class grievances of economically dislocated, dismissed MAGA voters. She would not look out of place at any of the Trump rallies I have covered over the last decade.

But, where others react with cruelty and self-interest, Steiner, who has lived in Iowa since 1996, said she reaches for kindness and connection.

“I’m a person that looks at things and says, ‘How do we make this better?’ ” Steiner said. “A lot of people, they have a lot of struggles, they have a lot of hardships, and they get bitter and they get angry, and I always took those as opportunities to grow.”

Steiner supports Medicare for all, “non-negotiable” medical privacy, a repeal of the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill and policies she says will put farmers and Iowa’s environment over corporate interests and greed.

She is thinking a lot about artificial intelligence these days, about how unregulated technological advances will steal American jobs, from factories to law firms to perhaps even the delivery rooms she inhabited as a women’s health nurse. No one is safe from the AI job-killing monster, she said.

“I hear it everywhere,” Steiner said.

“It’s going to take people’s jobs away,” she said.

She gets furious seeing self-check-outs at grocery and convenience stores.

“Yes, yes, that’s some of the problem,” she said. “It is disconnect. It is all of this Internet and AI. It is pulling people apart. People rely on that instead of human connections. All of this stuff, it goes between people.”

Steiner said she won’t back down on civil rights, or from defending marginalized demographics of Iowans from bullying. She has lived experience here, too, as Steiner has three daughters in the LGBTQ+ community — trans, lesbian and bisexual daughters.

“Everybody should have the same civil rights. These are absolute necessities,” Steiner said. “To say ‘you are only worthy if you believe the way I do’ — that just desecrates our Constitution, our Declaration of Independence. That is why we fled a tyrant king.”

There are two other announced candidates in Iowa’s 4th District Democratic congressional primary — Dave Dawson of Lawton, a prosecutor in the Woodbury County Attorney’s Office and a former state legislator, and Ashley WolfTornabane of Storm Lake, who has experience as a public school instructional assistant. Republicans have a full primary field as U.S. Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Hull, is running for governor.♦ 

Douglas Burns of Carroll is fourth-generation journalist and founder of Mercury Boost, a marketing and public relations company.