After years of President Joe Biden’s reluctance to even say the word “abortion” out loud, it was striking to watch Vice-President Kamala Harris speak decisively about the future of abortion rights during her first 48 hours as a 2024 presidential candidate.
“We who believe in reproductive freedom will stop Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans, because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris said at a rally in Milwaukee on Tuesday. “And when Congress passes the law to restore reproductive freedoms, as president of the United States, I will sign it into law.”
The speeches were a reminder that while Biden has had a complicated relationship to abortion rights, Harris has been the administration’s most vocal advocate on the issue since the overturn of Roe v. Wade. She’s traveled across the country meeting about abortion access with key stakeholders and in March became the highest-ranking government official in history to visit an abortion clinic. “Her statements around abortion are not just a talking point,” says Jennifer Driver, senior director of reproductive rights at State Innovation Exchange, a nonprofit that works with state lawmakers and advocates. “She has been on the ground talking to leaders, to activists, to everyday community members.”
This is why reproductive-rights advocates are excited by the prospect of Harris being the Democratic presidential nominee. The GOP has shied away from talking about the issue, and abortion was conspicuously absent from the Republican National Convention last week. With voters ranking abortion as one of their top issues this election season, advocates believe the vice-president can convince voters who are on the fence but care about abortion access to back Democrats in November. “She’s been on the offense with Trump on this issue from day one, really making it plain to American voters who is to blame here,” says Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of the advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly known as NARAL), which endorsed Harris on Sunday. “Kamala’s deep knowledge of the law is gonna make her the kind of fighter we need. We’re almost 100 days out. We gotta land some punches, and I think she’s the perfect person to do that.”
Harris’s record speaks for itself: As California’s attorney general, she defended one of the first bills in the country to crack down on anti-abortion centers’ deceptive practices. While serving in the U.S. Senate, Harris voted against a 20-week abortion ban and co-sponsored legislation prohibiting restrictions on abortion care. She also memorably grilled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings, asking him: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Kavanaugh stumbled over his response and ultimately said he couldn’t think of any laws. (The Trump nominee also had said that Roe was settled law but went on to vote to overturn the decision.)
Visiting Harris’s Senate office has stuck with advocate Erika Christensen, who had an abortion in 2016 at 32 weeks of pregnancy, since she began going to Capitol Hill with her husband to talk with lawmakers about the harm of viability bans. New York’s abortion law, which prohibited the procedure after 24 weeks, forced her to travel hundreds of miles and spend thousands of dollars in the midst of a medical crisis rather than allowing her to terminate her pregnancy and grieve its loss in the comfort of her own city. Christensen found most legislative-office visits frustrating. “They stick you with somebody on staff who has to know about a lot of things, but they’re not necessarily experts in what you’re there to discuss,” she says. “But Kamala Harris’s Senate office at the time was radically different because she had a brilliant reproductive-rights lawyer on staff who actually understood the law and how it impacted people.”
Christensen has watched how the vice-president has continued that approach in the wake of Dobbs. “She’s offering empathy and when she talks about abortion, she talks about it clearly, she uses real language,” Christensen says. “She is not patriarchal; she centers equity and bodily autonomy. All of that is great.” But she cautions that the Biden-Harris campaign shied away from a more aggressive approach to restoring abortion rights, focusing instead on codifying Roe. Christensen hopes that the Harris campaign will be “less about style and more on substance.”
Patient Forward, Christensen’s organization that focuses on abortion later in pregnancy, and other advocates recently published a comprehensive policy memo that outlines how to protect and expand abortion access at the federal level without compromising the needs of those who require care later in pregnancy. “What we’ve heard from mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden is this call to ‘restore Roe,’” she says. “But there are better pieces of legislation that protect abortion rights without arbitrary limits, that don’t protect the state’s right to criminalize pregnancy, and don’t protect a backdoor to denying people care. We know that Kamala Harris understands this. We hope that she has the political will to get us out of 1973 and into the future.” Restoring Roe, she notes, would have not necessarily helped patients like Amanda Zurawski and Kate Cox (both of whom campaigned on behalf of the Biden-Harris ticket), because Texas’s six-week abortion ban went into effect while Roe was still the law of the land.
Some factions of the center left are skeptical that voters will agree with the idea that the nation can do better than Roe. That’s why Renee Bracey Sherman, the founder and executive director of We Testify, which supports people who’ve had abortions and wish to tell their stories, believes advocates must push elected officials to think bigger. She says this moment calls for listening to Black and brown organizers who are on the frontlines of the health-care crisis that Dobbs unleashed, and she wants Harris to be brave enough to imagine a better landscape for abortion seekers if she becomes the Democratic nominee.
“It does matter when you have a presidential nominee who is willing to say the word abortion, who has met with abortion providers and some people who’ve had abortions,” Bracey Sherman says. “But I hope that people dump that useless slogan” — restore Roe, that is — “and actually come up with a thoughtful plan to increase access to abortion for everyone.”
The Cut offers an online tool you can use to search by Zip Code for professional providers, including clinics, hospitals, and independent OB/GYNs, as well as for abortion funds, transportation options, and information for remote resources like receiving the abortion pill by mail. For legal guidance, contact Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812 or the Abortion Defense Network.
