Harris puts abortion rights at the center of her campaign

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An excited Vice President Kamala Harris adopted a rapid-fire mentality to seize on the key issue of abortion rights this week.

At a hastily organized campaign rally in Atlanta, she called those behind abortion bans “those hypocrites” and claimed that some American communities now facing abortion bans have been neglected for years when it comes to maternal care. “Where have you been?” she asked.

The shift toward an intense focus on abortion rights evolved over the week after the nonprofit newsroom ProPublica published a report on two Georgia women who died as a result of delayed medical care linked to the state’s abortion ban.

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

On Friday, under Harris’ direction, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reported, the campaign had planned a last-minute rally in Georgia, where Harris spoke in front of signs arguing that one-third of women live under a “Trump abortion ban” — a phrase she repeated throughout the speech.

“It’s reminiscent of the kind of hastily organized trip that put Harris at the center of then-President Joe Biden’s reelection effort and an example of the kinds of moments her campaign is seizing on to elevate — and amplify — issues it believes will galvanize voters and mobilize them to vote,” Alvarez wrote.

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

ProPublica’s reporting, along with a series of earlier testimony Democrats presented at their convention in Chicago in August, have elevated the issue of abortion rights, particularly in states where restrictions are in place, including the battleground states of Georgia and North Carolina.

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

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

Thurman, a mother who planned to go to nursing school, discovered she was pregnant with twins and wanted to terminate the pregnancy, according to ProPublica. She ended up taking abortion pills after driving to North Carolina, which had not yet enacted its current abortion restrictions. Thurman suffered a rare complication that required a procedure 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 at risk.

Speaking to Winfrey on Thursday, Harris argued that even abortion restrictions that allow exceptions for the life of the mother are not enough because they force doctors to determine whether a woman is “on the verge of death” before treating her.

CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed Dr. Nisha Verma, an obstetrician-gynecologist practicing in Georgia, about the effect the bans have had on care for pregnant women.

“We’re dealing with these really difficult situations where we’re trying to figure out at what point in this care process can we intervene,” Verma said. “There’s no threshold where someone goes from being completely well to dying acutely.”

“It’s really not clear, based on that law, based on that exception for medical emergencies, when we can intervene in each particular situation,” he said.

Verma described the treatment of a patient who had undergone in vitro fertilization and was using her last embryo and really wanted to get pregnant, but found out at around 18 weeks that the baby would not survive.

As the patient grappled with the tragic situation, Verma said doctors were trying to figure out how sick she would have to get before they could provide care.

“That compounded their suffering in this already dire situation,” Verma said.

In a New York Times-Siena College poll of likely voters that found the national race tied, abortion rights is one issue where Harris has an edge: 54% of likely voters are confident she will 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 edge.

Harris’ strength on abortion rights rests on key constituencies she expects to turn out in droves to support her on Election Day. Among young people ages 18 to 29, nearly three-quarters said they trust Harris on that issue. Among Black voters, 83% trust Harris, and among Hispanic voters, it was 63%.

Compared with white voters, black and Hispanic voters were more likely to say in the poll that 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 a federal law restoring abortion rights nationwide, though such a law appears unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, where a 60-vote supermajority would likely be required to enact such a change.

The vast majority of voters, 89%, believe this election will have an impact on abortion rights, with 61% saying it will have a “major” impact, according to KFF.

Unsurprisingly, voters are more likely to say they trust the Democratic nominee to handle abortion rights than the Republican, but it’s a lead that 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 report that by framing abortion rights as a matter of personal freedom and featuring real-life testimonies from women affected by abortion bans along with their spouses, Harris’ campaign has attempted to make it more relevant to male voters during a reproductive freedom bus tour this week in the key swing state of Pennsylvania.