WWhen he was nominated, Joe Biden’s favorite euphemism for abortion was “Roe.” He would talk about “upholding” Roe v Wade, even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned it in June 2022. Reproductive rights advocates were outraged, pointing to how many people had been denied abortions under Roe, and how weak the decision’s protections for reproductive rights on the grounds of personal autonomy or gender equality had been.
Frankly, it was hard to get the president to even talk about abortion. He seemed to avoid even using the word “abortion.” When he did talk about the procedure—and the bans Republicans have passed across the country—he preferred to focus on women who had been denied emergency abortions for wanted pregnancies amid tragic health complications.
In his hands, abortion became an issue in which sad, troubled, helpless women could be helped by the grace of heroic men like himself—or like the imaginary doctor he referenced in his disastrous June debate with Donald Trump, a man, Biden said, who would determine whether an abortion seeker “needed help or not.” Abortion, he said, was an unpleasant but necessary evil that men brokered for women. It was certainly not an issue of adult women’s rights, dignity, or autonomy over their own bodies and lives.
Kamala Harris, Biden’s successor at the top of the Democratic ticket after he withdrew last Sunday, has taken a different approach. The Biden administration had largely delegated the message on abortion rights to the vice president, out of respect for Biden’s clear personal discomfort with the issue and his growing inability to campaign effectively at all. (The anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America called Harris Biden’s “abortion czar” — a moniker that may have sounded cooler than she intended.) She went on a multi-state tour earlier this year focused on the issue, including what was reportedly the first public visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice president: a stop at a Planned Parenthood in St. Paul, Minnesota, where Harris appeared with the clinic’s medical director and praised the clinic’s staff for their “real leadership.”
“It is only right and fair that people have access to the health care they need,” she said.
The result has been a divergence in the abortion message within the White House, with Harris making a much more robust case for abortion, and for reproductive justice in general, in much more affirmative and unapologetic terms. The preferred slogan she repeated when speaking on the issue was not Biden’s tepid and euphemistic “restore Roe.” Instead, Harris has pointedly referenced Dr. George Tiller, an abortion doctor murdered by anti-abortion extremists in 2009, who summed up his own approach to abortion in two words: “Trust women.”
Before Biden dropped out of the race, the November presidential election was set to be little more than a referendum on his age. But now that he’s out of office, Harris has the chance to make a much stronger case for Democratic policy. And reproductive rights, an issue that has motivated female voters in large numbers even in deeply conservative states since the Dobbs ruling, appears to be central to her agenda.
The move is good politics. Abortion rights are extremely popular and have only become more popular in the years since Dobbs, mobilizing voters who would stay home or vote Republican when other issues are more relevant. A new poll An Associated Press poll found that six in 10 Americans support abortion for any reason; other polls show even higher levels of support for abortion, especially early in pregnancy.
It’s not just that abortion is popular in the abstract: abortion bans are wildly unpopular in particular. The reality of the post-Dobbs bans is has dramatically changed public opinion On the issue: Since May 2019, the percentage of Americans who say abortion should be legal under all circumstances has increased 10 points, to 35%. The percentage who say it should be illegal under all circumstances — the position advocated by the Republican Party platform, which supports recognizing fetuses and embryos as persons under the 14th Amendment — has fallen dramatically over the same period, to just 12%.
These shifts in public opinion have had a clear impact at the ballot box. Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the November 2022 midterms has been attributed to outrage over the Dobbs decision in June. But a desire to protect or restore abortion rights has driven strong turnout, even in heavily Republican states: Kansas, Kentucky And Ohio have all voted overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights since Dobbs. Harris has seized this shift in a way Biden has not, speaking passionately — and credibly — about abortion as a matter not just of health but of dignity.
Harris has also slyly and repeatedly drawn connections between Trump’s last term, which saw three anti-abortion zealots appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the harm that abortion bans have caused in Republican-controlled states. She refers to state laws banning the procedure as “Trump bans abortionThis focus could pay off in November: in addition to Harris’ presidential bid, a total of five states – Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, Maryland and Florida – will have abortion rights measures on the ballot.
Meanwhile, the Republican ticket has sunk further into an ideology of misogyny and gender reaction. Trump’s vice presidential candidate, J.D. Vance, is a passionate and lurid misogynist; he recently referred to Harris and other Democratic women as “childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives,” and that childless women have “no direct stake” in America’s future. He has also suggested that citizens without children their voices diluted.
Childless women seem to be a particularly difficult target group for the Trump camp’s army of lustful creeps: both the media personality Laura Loomer and the lawyer and think tank thorn in the flesh Will Chamberlain quickly joined Vance in attacking Harris for not having biological children. It’s a fitting line of attack; after all, the reason Republicans are pursuing abortion bans in the first place is because they have an extremely narrow view of what women should be, a view they want to enforce with law.
Abortion rights advocates will certainly try to push Harris for even more commitments to reproductive freedom and justice. But Harris is at least willing to argue that women can be things other than mothers. Like, perhaps, the president.