Amy Gertner grew up in Hope surrounded by family — all Crabtrees, like her mom. They lived on Crabtree Road in a house built by her father at the base of Crabtree Mountain, and in the summers she, her sister, and a “literal horde of cousins” would rake blueberries till their hands were stained purple and then ride their bikes down the mountain and straight into the pond. They made $2 for every pail that they picked, and then blew all their earnings at the Union Fair. Back then, in the 1990s, she thought everyone’s childhood was like that. And growing up in that Maine idyll, there were two things that Gertner was certain of: that she wanted to be a teacher and she wanted to be a mom.
She made the former happen, and has worked in schools for nearly 15 years now — including at Hope’s Sweet Tree Arts, as a librarian at the Hope Elementary School, and as a lacrosse coach at Camden Hills Regional High School. The latter, well, it’s been more challenging than expected. “The journey of fertility for me has been long,” she told me recently. “I just never thought it would be this hard.”
Gertner and her husband, like countless other couples, have been dealing with infertility. They got married in 2023, when Gertner was 37, and didn’t waste any time before trying to get pregnant — but they haven’t yet been able to conceive. Her husband, a small business owner and veteran who served four tours overseas, gets his health insurance through the VA, which also provides him a monthly check of a little less than five thousand dollars as a disability compensation related to his service. If their infertility had been attributable to him, the VA would have fully covered up to three rounds of IVF treatments. “But he has A+ sperm,” Gertner said wryly, “so the VA is not giving us any money.” Instead, they looked into paying out of pocket, and found that in Boston, the closest option to where they lived in Sullivan, the start-up costs alone would be $25,000 for a single round — far more than they can afford.
So this month the couple will travel to Norway to do IVF, where one round costs just $5,500. This kind of international medical tourism is not in itself that unusual anymore; fertility tourism alone is expected to grow from a $1.5 billion industry to a more than $6 billion one in the next five years. What is unusual is that Gertner is married to U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner, so all of this is happening against the backdrop of a grueling campaign schedule and intense public scrutiny. But Platner is running for the seat in part because of how broken he thinks the U.S. health care system is, and because if he wins, he will have the power to actually change things. So with Gertner turning 40 this month, and time being of the essence, their quest to start a family is now part of the campaign, too.
It’s wild to think back to a year ago now, when absolutely none of this was on the horizon. Gertner and Platner originally met in 2021 when they both had other partners, but reconnected on Bumble just six months before they got married. Last winter, they were living in Sullivan, a tiny town down east of Ellsworth where he grew up and now runs an oyster farm. Gertner moved there to be with him and got a teaching job at a local school, but was feeling extremely burnt out. There was no amount of sleep that made her feel rested. Since the pandemic, teaching had become much more stressful than it had previously been, and since the November 2024 election it had gotten even worse. “The language of bullying was becoming the norm,” she said, “because it was coming from our government officials.”
She knew something needed to change, especially if she wanted to get pregnant. So last winter she left her job and started working alongside Platner at the oyster farm, picking up gigs with her sister’s catering company on the side. Mostly, she tried to take very good care of herself, going to the Y in Ellsworth, hiking with their two dogs, gardening. She even did a puzzle, she told me brightly, of lighthouses in New England. But by last spring, they still hadn’t gotten pregnant. That’s when she started looking into alternatives.
“After we were told that IVF was so expensive and it was not going to get covered by the VA, I thought it was the end of the road for a baby,” she said. “I was really, really sad and then somebody mentioned to look abroad. I thought it was crazy, but then I looked up Norway because they have a good reputation.” She found a clinic west of Oslo, on the fjords, and sent them an email.
“Just to give you an idea, when we were looking at doing it here in New England, we had to pay a $500 non-refundable fee to schedule a 15-minute Zoom call six months in the future for our intake exam,” Platner said. “When Amy found this clinic in Norway, she emailed them on a Monday and they were like, ‘Oh, do you want to do an hour-long intake with the surgeon on Thursday?’ And so we did. The surgeon was great and at the end of it I was like, ‘all right, so how much do we owe you guys?’ And they were like, ‘why would you pay us for this?’ And I was like, ‘we’re going to Norway.’”
The Norway idea had come about in the spring, just a few months before Platner was approached and asked to run in the Senate Democratic primary. Running for office was an idea that they both initially thought was insane. “I’m like, honey, we just got married, we are figuring out how to run a business together. I’ve never done QuickBooks before, and we’re trying to get f**king pregnant!” Gertner said. “That’s… a lot.”
But after polling their friends and family, they both came around. And Platner’s campaign exploded at the outset, getting him nationwide attention and profiles in a slew of glossy national magazines. His platform centers largely on what he calls the “material freedoms” his VA benefits have given him, like health care. Without them, he says, he wouldn’t be able to own his oyster farm, own his home, or have anything resembling the life that he has. His stump speech hinges on the fact that this sort of support should be available to everyone, without having to fight in a war.
“It’s less about the VA and more about the fact that IVF is unaffordable for regular working-class people in this country,” Platner told me. “The concept of insurance companies not covering infertility treatment is why we need universal health care. Our story of infertility is just another example among many stories, we know we aren’t the only people struggling with this.” And so the two of them decided to talk about this choice publicly, too. Because if flying to Norway, spending two weeks in an Airbnb, and paying out-of-pocket for health care makes more financial sense than getting care here in America, well, that says something in and of itself.
This year marked the first time in 15 years that Gertner didn’t go back to a classroom in the fall. She’s employed by the Platner campaign now, working as a volunteer coordinator, for about the same amount of money that Platner collects from the VA. (Because he’s put all his earnings right back into his business for years, and so on paper appears to make nothing, he’s not eligible for a salary reimbursement from the campaign.) It’s prompted a bit of an identity crisis, she told me. Not teaching, possibly not being a biological mom, not living in the Midcoast full time. It’s all a lot to navigate, particularly for someone with anxiety, like she has. The two of them are entering 2026 with incredible uncertainty about what the year will bring — a baby? A Senate seat? Both? Neither?
She takes a lot of comfort in coming home to Hope, where I went to see her on a bright but frigid Sunday morning in mid-December. Gertner sat at her mother’s dining table in the house she’d grown up in, next to a roaring fire, admiring the Christmas tree harvested from a nearby field, nearly as wide as it was tall. She and Platner had just returned from a weeklong fundraising and networking trip where they’d gone to Denver, Boulder, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn. On the California leg, they’d flown in in the morning, held three events (lunch, happy hour, after event) and then caught a red-eye back to the East Coast. “I never reclined in LA,” she said. “It was a bit of a grueling trip.” Platner, who’d been asleep in Gertner’s childhood bedroom, had gotten sick on the last day of the trip but had gone immediately from the airport to what they were calling “Graham camp,” a volunteer training held in Brunswick. At one point he padded downstairs, bleary-eyed, looking for a phone charger and a glass of orange juice, before retreating back to bed.
Gertner said she was still figuring out her role in the campaign on trips like this one. She’d ended up playing a host of them — sometimes she was ground support, staying on at the airport to collect baggage so Platner could jet off to meet a possible campaign contributor, or make it to a meeting. Other times, she stood beside him as his wife, wearing a nice dress. “Which for me is like a wool dress that I got at Serendipity,” she said, referring to the consignment store in Camden. “So I wore my secondhand wool dress and my consignment boots to a black tie event in D.C. I certainly felt like a country mouse.” Multiple sitting senators and their staff had attended that event.
The week after, Gertner was scheduled to work a catering event with her sister, Laura, who co-owns Stones Throw Catering: the holiday party for Cold Mountain Builders, where her dad has worked as a cabinetmaker and shop manager for decades. The Norwegian clinic had shipped her everything she needed to get ready for the IVF, and so around Christmastime, she started her hormone injections. Then it was off to Norway. And after that, it’s anyone’s guess.
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.