Harris puts abortion rights at the center of her campaign

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A fired-up Vice President Kamala Harris took a rapid-response approach this week to address the key issue of abortion rights.

Calling those behind abortion bans “these hypocrites,” she argued at a hastily organized campaign event in Atlanta that some U.S. communities currently grappling with abortion bans have been neglected for years when it comes to maternal care. “Where have you been?” she asked.

The shift to a more focused abortion rights issue came within a week of ProPublica’s independent report on two Georgia women who died after delays in receiving medical care related to that state’s abortion ban.

On Thursday, the mother of one of the women was in the audience at the event broadcast live from Michigan, telling Harris and Oprah Winfrey the story of her daughter’s tragedy.

On Friday, at Harris’ behest, the campaign scheduled a last-minute rally in Georgia at which Harris spoke while standing in front of signs that read that one-third of women live under “Trump’s abortion bans,” a statement she repeated throughout her speech, according to CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez.

“It’s reminiscent of the kind of quickly orchestrated trip that put Harris at the center of then-President Joe Biden’s re-election bid, and an example of the kind of moments her campaign uses to raise — and amplify — issues it believes will mobilize voters and get them out to vote,” Alvarez wrote.

Former President Donald Trump argued that he did the country a favor by appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and return abortion to state legislatures. Trump says that’s what “everyone” wanted, but polls and recent elections suggest otherwise.

The ProPublica reporting, as well as numerous earlier statements by Democrats at their convention in Chicago in August, raised the issue of abortion rights, especially in states with restrictions, including key swing states like Georgia and North Carolina.

“I’m just so sad,” Harris told Shanette Williams, whose 28-year-old daughter, Amber Nicole Thurman, died in 2022.

“And the courage that all of you have shown is extraordinary because you just learned how her death occurred,” Harris said at the Michigan event. ProPublica reported that a state review board, which included doctors, issued a nonpublic report that determined Thurman’s death was preventable.

Thurman, a mother who planned to go to nursing school, found out she was pregnant with twins and wanted to terminate the pregnancy, according to ProPublica. She ended up taking abortion pills after arriving in North Carolina, which had not yet enacted its current abortion restrictions. Thurman developed a rare complication that required surgery at a hospital. Doctors waited to operate because the procedure, known as a D&C (dilation and curettage), is now a felony in Georgia unless the mother’s life is in danger.

In an interview with Winfrey on Thursday, Harris argued that even abortion restrictions that allow exceptions for the mother’s life are not enough because they force doctors to determine whether a woman is “at death’s door” before they begin treatment.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed Dr. Nisha Verma, an obstetrician and gynecologist based in Georgia, about how the bans are affecting the care of pregnant women.

“We’re struggling with these really difficult situations where we’re trying to figure out where in that continuum of care we can intervene,” Verma said. “There’s no line where someone goes from completely healthy to acute death.”

“Under this law, under this exception for medical emergencies, it’s really unclear when we can intervene in a particular situation,” she said.

Verma described the treatment of a patient who had undergone IVF and was using her last embryo. She desperately wanted to get pregnant but learned around 18 weeks that the baby would not survive.

While the patient was struggling with this dire situation, Verma said doctors tried to estimate how sick she had to be so they could provide her with care.

“It deepened her suffering in an already terrible situation,” Verma said.

In a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters that showed a tie in the national race, abortion rights are an issue on which Harris has an advantage — 54% of likely voters trust her to do a better job on abortion rights, compared with 41% who trust Trump. On several other key issues in the poll, such as the economy, Trump has an advantage.

Harris’ strength on abortion rights is building on key groups she hopes will turn out in droves for her on Election Day. Among young people ages 18 to 29, nearly three-quarters said they trust Harris on the issue. Among black voters, 83% trust Harris, and 63% of Latino voters.

Compared with white likely voters, black and Latino voters were more likely in the poll to say they think Trump will try to pass a national abortion ban. Trump has said he will not.

A majority of voters (61% in a KFF poll released this month) said they would prefer to see federal legislation restoring abortion rights nationwide. However, such legislation is unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, where a supermajority of 60 votes would likely be needed to pass such a change.

According to KFF, a large majority of voters (89%) believe this election will have an impact on abortion rights, with 61% saying it will have a “substantial” impact.

It was predictable that voters would be more likely to say they trust the Democratic candidate on abortion rights than the Republican candidate, but that advantage has grown since Harris replaced Biden, according to the KFF poll.

Abortion rights may not be a motivating issue for men. But CNN’s Arit John, Eva McKend and David Wright reported that by framing abortion rights as a personal freedom issue and featuring real-life testimonies from women affected by abortion bans and their spouses, the Harris campaign sought to make it more relevant to male voters during her Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour this week in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.