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      Melania Trump’s abortion views baffle both sides: ‘Hard to follow the logic’

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      The revelation on Wednesday evening that Melania Trump’s forthcoming memoir includes a full-throated defense of abortion rights, an issue her husband Donald Trump has repeatedly flip-flopped on during his presidential campaign, left people on both sides of the issue less than impressed.“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body,” Melania Trump wrote in her memoir. “I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”Melania Trump also defended the right to abortion later on in pregnancy – a procedure that her husband has repeatedly demonized. (Less than 1% of abortions occur at or past 21 weeks of gestation.)“Sadly for the women across America, Mrs. Trump’s husband firmly disagrees with her and is the reason that more than one in three American women live under a Trump abortion ban that threatens their health, their freedom and their lives,” Harris campaign spokesperson Sarafina Chitika said in an email. “Donald Trump has made it abundantly clear: If he wins in November, he will ban abortion nationwide, punish women and restrict women’s access to reproductive health care.”Melania Trump’s remarks also took anti-abortion activists by surprise.“It’s hard to follow the logic of putting out the former First Lady’s book right before the election undercutting President Trump’s message to pro-life voters,” Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful Students for Life of America, posted on Twitter/X on Wednesday night. “What a waste of momentum.”Over the last several weeks, anti-abortion activists have grown increasingly fed up with the former president, who has struggled, alongside the rest of the Republican party, to redefine his messaging on abortion rights amid outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade.Earlier in his campaign, Trump bragged about appointing three of the US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe, branded himself the “most pro-life president ever”. After Kamala Harris became the presidential nominee, however, Trump has pledged that his administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights” as well as vowed not to sign a national abortion ban – just weeks after refusing to say that he would veto one.Melania Trump’s comments may feel like a further insult to the anti-abortion voters who feel abandoned by Trump, said Republican campaign strategist Liz Mair, adding anti-abortion advocates run potent get-out-the-vote operations. Those advocates were key to Trump’s 2016 victory.“This might be just another thing that piles on to make pro-lifers think: ‘I just can’t with this guy.’ A lot of them were single-issue voters anyway,” Mair said. “He’s not really giving them much of an incentive to show up and do anything to his benefit.”When Tresa Undem, a pollster who has surveyed people about abortion for more than two decades, heard the comments, she immediately thought: “Wow”. Then she thought: “It’s a campaign move.”However, Undem is not sure who, exactly, the move is for – especially given the Trumps’ sometimes frosty relationship in public. Melania Trump has rarely aired her political views and has largely vanished from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign.The odds of Melania Trump’s comments comforting moderate or conservative voters who support abortion rights are “fairly slim”, Undem said.“These strong feelings – they did not suddenly appear this year, right? So she clearly has had no influence on him when it comes to policy related to abortion,” Undem said. “I don’t think she’s ever been positioned, or voters ever think of her, as having any kind of policy position or weight or influence on Trump.” More

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      Where will abortion be on the ballot in the 2024 US election?

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      This November, abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states, including the states that could determine the next president.In the two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion has become the kind of issue that decides elections. Outrage over Roe’s demise led Republicans to flounder in the 2022 midterms, and abortion rights supporters have won every post-Roe abortion-related ballot measure, including in red states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas.This year, most of the ballot measures are seeking to amend states’ constitutions to protect abortion rights up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Because a number of the measures are in states that have outlawed abortion, they could become the first to overturn the post-Roe ban. Others are in states where abortion is legal, but activists say the measures are necessary to cement protections so they can’t be easily overturned if Republicans control the government.These are the states slated to vote on abortion this election day.ArizonaAbortion rights supporters in Arizona, a key battleground state in the presidential election, are vying to pass a measure that would enshrine the right to abortion up until viability in the state constitution. A provider could perform an abortion after viability if the procedure is necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of a patient.Arizona currently bans abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy. Earlier this year, the state supreme court reinstated a 19th-century near-total abortion ban, generating nationwide outrage that prompted the state legislature to quickly repeal it in favor of letting the 15-week ban stand.ColoradoColorado’s measure would amend the state constitution to block the state government from denying, impeding or discriminating against individuals’ “right to abortion”. This measure also includes a one-of-a-kind provision to bar Colorado from prohibiting healthcare coverage for abortion – which could very well pass in the deep-blue state.Because Colorado permits abortion throughout pregnancy and neighbors five states with bans – Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Utah and Nebraska – the state has become a haven for people fleeing abortion bans, especially those seeking abortions later in pregnancy.FloridaOnce the last stronghold of southern abortion access, Florida in May banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy, which is before many women know they’re pregnant. Its measure, which needs 60% of the vote to pass, would roll back that ban by adding the right to an abortion up until viability to the state’s constitution. Providers could perform an abortion after viability if one is needed to protect a patient’s health.Florida Republicans’ tactics in the fight against the measure has alarmed voting rights and civil rights groups. Law enforcement officials have investigated voters who signed petitions to get the measure onto the ballot, while a state health agency has created a webpage attacking the amendment.MarylandLegislators, rather than citizens, initiated Maryland’s measure, which would amend the state constitution to confirm individuals’ “right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end the individual’s pregnancy”. Like Colorado, Maryland has become an abortion haven because it permits the procedure throughout pregnancy. It is also relatively close to the deep south, which is blanketed in bans. MissouriAbortion opponents went to court to stop Missouri’s measure from appearing on voters’ ballots, but the state supreme court rejected their arguments and agreed to let voters decide whether the Missouri constitution should guarantee the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which is the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive healthcare, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions”.Missouri, which was the first state to ban abortion after Roe fell, only permits the procedure in medical emergencies. If the measure passes, it is expected to roll back that ban and permit abortion until viability.MontanaIn the years since Roe fell, Montana courts and its Republican-dominated legislature have wrestled over abortion restrictions and whether the right to privacy embedded in Montana’s constitution includes the right to abortion. Abortion remains legal until viability in Montana, but the measure would amend the state constitution to explicitly include “a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion” up until viability. Providers could perform an abortion after viability to protect a patient’s life or health.NebraskaNebraska, which bans abortion past 12 weeks of pregnancy, is the lone state with two competing ballot measures this November. One of the measures would enshrine the right to abortion up until viability into the state constitution, while the other would enshrine the current ban. If both measures pass, the measure that garners the most votes would take effect.NevadaAlongside Arizona, Nevada is one of the most closely watched states in the presidential election. Its measure would amend the state constitution to protect individuals’ right to abortion up until viability, or after viability in cases where a patient’s health or life may be threatened. Nevada already permits abortion up until 26 weeks of pregnancy.New YorkNew York state legislators added a measure to the ballot to broaden the state’s anti-discrimination laws by adding, among other things, protections against discrimination on the basis of “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health”.Although sky-blue New York passed a law protecting reproductive rights in 2019, advocates say this measure could be used to defend abortion rights against future challenges. However, the ballot language before voters will not include the word “abortion”, leading advocates to fear voters will not understand what they are voting on. Democrats pushed to add the word “abortion” to the description of the measure, but a judge rejected the request, ruling that the amendment poses “complex interpretive questions” and its exact impact on abortion rights is unclear.South DakotaSouth Dakota’s measure is less sweeping than other abortion rights measures, because it would only protect the right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. Under this measure, South Dakota could regulate access to abortion “only in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman” in the second trimester of pregnancy. In the third trimester, the state could ban abortion except in medical emergencies. Right now, South Dakota only allows abortions in such emergencies.Although this measure will appear on the ballot, there will be a trial over the validity of the signatures that were collected for it. Depending out the outcome of the trial, the measure – and any votes cast for it – could be invalidated. More

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      Kamala Harris decries Trump’s abortion comments in first solo TV interview

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      Kamala Harris sat for her first solo interview as the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday, laying out her plan to boost the middle class and condemning her rival Donald Trump on his comments over abortion.During the interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, which was held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the vice-president painted Trump as a candidate focused on the rich at the expense of the middle class, and herself as better equipped to handle the economy.“The top economists in our country have compared our plans and say mine would grow the economy, [and] his would shrink it,” she said during the interview.On his economic record, Harris said: “Donald Trump made a whole lot of promises that he did not meet.”Harris also showed disdain over Trump’s comments over abortion, expressing he needs to trust women to make their own reproductive decisions. Her comments came after Trump, at a Pennsylvania rally, called himself a “protector” of women, claiming American women will not be “thinking about abortion” if he is elected.“Donald Trump is also the person who said women should be punished for exercising a decision that they, rightly, should be able to make about their own body and future,” Harris said.On a lighter note, Harris confirmed that she worked at McDonald’s, pushing back against Trump’s allegations that she did not.“Part of the reason I even talk about having worked at McDonald’s is because there are people who work at McDonald’s who are trying to raise a family,” she said, alluding to her economic policy plan to help working-class families.“I think part of the difference between me and my opponent includes our perspective on the needs of the American people and what our responsibility, then, is to meet those needs,” Harris added.The interview comes at a time when Harris faces harsh criticism over the lack of media interviews she has done. Earlier this month, Axios reported that the Harris-Walz campaign has so far given fewer interviews than any other candidates in modern history.Trump and JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential pick, have used it as ammunition during their campaign speeches. On X, Vance responded to news of Harris’s interview by saying: “This is legitimately pathetic for a person who wants to be president. Ruhle has explicitly endorsed Harris. She won’t ask hard Qs. Kamala runs from tough questions because she can’t defend her record. If you want open borders and high groceries, vote for status quo Kamala.”In August, Harris was interviewed on CNN alongside Walz. The interview was hosted by Dana Bash and was aired as a one-hour primetime special. After the interview, Republicans criticized the joint interview with Walz for being pre-recorded and not live.Since then, Harris has given a handful of interviews, mostly with local outlets or more niche forums, including an appearance with Stephanie “Chiquibaby” Himonidis, a Spanish-language radio host and podcaster.Harris also appeared in a live-streamed “Unite For America” event with supporters hosted by Oprah Winfrey last week. More

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      ‘One death is too many’: abortion bans usher in US maternal mortality crisis

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      In Louisiana, doctors will no longer be able to carry a lifesaving medication with them during pregnancy emergencies. In Texas, the infant mortality rate is soaring. In Idaho, pregnant people drive hours just to give birth. And in Oklahoma and Georgia, women are bleeding out in hospital parking lots and facing dangerous infections before they can find care – and sometimes, that care comes too late.The limitations and outright bans on abortion that have taken hold in half of the US in the wake of the Dobbs decision have wreaked enormous changes to the reproductive health landscape.The restrictions put a growing burden on the health and wellbeing of patients and providers, even as more Americans find it difficult to find and access care.“The United States is, and has been for quite some time, in the midst of a maternal and infant mortality crisis,” said Dr Jamila Perritt, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.Banning access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, is “directly causing an increase in morbidity and mortality in our community”, she said. “We have really robust evidence that shows us that when people have sought abortion care and are unable to obtain it, their psychological, social, physical and emotional health is harmed.”Maternal and infant mortality will probably increase because of the restrictions – especially if national limitations, like enforcement of the Comstock Act, are put into place.“I expect in the next few years, we’re going to start to see the infant mortality, pre-term birth, maternal mortality, and maternal morbidity numbers rise for everyone, and particularly for folks from racially marginalized and low-socioeconomic communities,” said Rachel Hardeman, professor of reproductive health and founding director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota.Calculating mortality is often a complicated and controversial endeavor. When maternal mortality dropped in 2022, anti-abortion advocates credited the success to the Dobbs decision.But that’s not the case, according to new research in Jama Network Open.Maternal deaths surged during the first two years of the pandemic, when Covid, a deadly illness during pregnancy, accounted for one-quarter of all maternal deaths. But in 2022, that rate dropped to levels similar to pre-pandemic levels, from 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021 to 22.3 in 2022.That rate is still higher than maternal mortality rates in peer nations, and research indicates it will increase if officials clamp down on abortion nationally – which, with the Comstock Act, would require no additional anti-abortion legislation or bans.Right now, “people can still travel to other states, but once there’s a federal ban, that won’t be an option any more,” says Amanda Jean Stevenson, co-author of the new Jama research and a sociologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “And there could be this very different set of outcomes when people’s options are gone.”In the United States, more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths and more than 60% of infant deaths in the first week are preventable – and those figures were estimated before the Dobbs decision.Because of abortion restrictions, there are already significant challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare – and it’s not just abortion care.In Louisiana, misoprostol – a drug used for medication abortion and other lifesaving purposes – will be labeled a controlled substance beginning on 1 October. One of its uses is keeping patients from bleeding out after childbirth, which is the No 1 cause of postpartum mortality.Yet physicians cannot keep controlled substances in their emergency carts, and they fear they won’t have enough time to fill prescriptions for patients when minutes and even seconds make the difference between life and death.In the year following Texas’s abortion ban, child mortality shot up by 12.9% – compared with a 1.8% increase in the rest of the country, according to a recent study. Congenital anomalies are the leading cause of infant death in the US – but while they went down by 3.1% in the rest of the country, they went up by 22.9% in Texas.“That study was chilling. That is a huge change,” Stevenson said.It echoed previous research finding that states with the most restrictive abortion laws saw 16% more infant deaths between 2014 and 2018.The trauma and costs of carrying to term pregnancies that are incompatible with life inflict an incalculable toll on families and providers.States are closing obstetric units and losing experienced providers who worry about not being able to offer lifesaving care as patients die on the table in front of them, and facing jail time if they provide care.More than two-thirds (68%) of obstetricians and gynecologists say the Dobbs decision has made it harder for them to respond to pregnancy-related emergencies, according to the non-partisan health research organization KFF. They also believe it has worsened mortality in pregnancy while increasing racial and ethnic inequities, and fewer doctors are now interested in entering the field.In 2022, soon after the Dobbs decision, medical residency applications dropped for states with bans.More than half of doctors surveyed in states with bans and limitations said they were very concerned about legal repercussions to providing the standard of care in pregnancy.“That can just exacerbate already pretty large gaps in the workforce,” said Usha Ranji, associate director for women’s health policy at KFF.In the past two years, more than 100 hospitals have closed their obstetric units entirely, according to a new March of Dimes report. More than one-third of US counties are now maternity care deserts, with no obstetricians or places to give birth. North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Oklahoma and Nebraska have the least access to maternity care.The majority of rural hospitals (57%) no longer deliver babies, with more than 100 of the rural hospitals ending labor and delivery services in the past five years.“We’ve created policy and legislation to limit access to abortions and also have closed the exact places that people need to go to get care if they are pregnant,” Hardeman said. That puts pressure on neighboring states that still provide care, she said.“Where you live matters for your health. And I think that the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe have demonstrated that in a very real and very obvious way, because there are literally places in this country where there is essentially no access to reproductive healthcare,” she said.“It started out in rural spaces, but more and more, there’s reports popping up of labor and delivery units closing in, like, urban Chicago.”In states with restrictions on abortion, women of color and pregnant people from low-income communities often suffer the most, said Hardeman. “Taking away access to reproductive healthcare is exacerbating those disparities.”Black women die because of pregnancy at twice the national rate, and three times more than white women, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“The fact that black women and birthing people are dying at three to four times greater risk than white women is shameful – and it’s preventable,” Perritt said.It’s important to shore up protections for reproductive health for all Americans before health complications and mortality rise even more, she said. “One death is too much. One is too many.” More

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      Harris calls for end to Senate filibuster to restore US abortion rights

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      Kamala Harris has called for an end to the Senate filibuster to make good on her pledge to restore the right to abortion through legislation.The US vice-president, herself a former senator, told a radio station in Wisconsin that eliminating the filibuster – which sets a 60-vote threshold in the 100-seat upper chamber of the US Congress – would be necessary to codify the rights that were enshrined in Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling that upheld the right to legal abortion throughout the US until it was overturned by a ruling two years ago.“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body – and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris told WPR, an affiliate of National Public Radio, on a campaign trip to Wisconsin, a key midwestern swing state where she has a wafer-thin lead over Donald Trump, according to recent polls.Her remarks accentuated her determination to put abortion rights at the heart of her campaign message amid polling evidence that it is a priority for many women voters.However, it cost her the support of the outgoing West Virginia senator, Joe Manchin – a former Democrat who left the party this year to become an independent – who said he would not endorse her candidacy because of her pledge.“Shame on her,” Manchin, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, told CNN. “She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”Trump has been on the defensive on abortion because the 2022 supreme court ruling was achieved with the votes of three conservative justices he appointed to the bench when he was president. Harris has claimed that Trump would sign a nationwide ban if he re-captured the White House, although he insists he would leave it to individual states.Harris’s use of a radio interview to underline her commitment follows criticism that she was deliberately avoiding high-profile interviews – a charge Harris has sought to counter by making herself available to selected media in battleground states.Trump told a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday that he would be women’s “protectors” and that they would not “be thinking about abortion” if he won a second term.Harris’s filibuster remarks echoed a similar comment by Joe Biden immediately after Roe v Wade was struck down, when he said an exception to the time-honoured Senate rule had to be made to guarantee abortion rights.“I believe we have to codify Roe v Wade in the law,” he said. “And the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that. And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights – it should be (that) we provide an exception to this … requiring an exception to the filibuster for this action to deal with the supreme court decision.”Harris has previously advocated overriding the filibuster to pass additional voting rights laws and Green New Deal legislation.In 2020, Barack Obama described the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” from America’s racially segregated past and argued that it should be eliminated if used to block voting reform.The filibuster describes the use of prolonged debate to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. It can be invoked by any senator objecting to a bill and has been used with increasing regularity in recent decades.It can only be overridden by triggering “cloture”, which requires a three-fifths majority vote – or 60 of the 100 senators. If cloture passes, it enables a vote on the original measure the filibuster was designed to block.The longest filibuster in Senate history was achieved by Strom Thurmond, the pro-segregationist South Carolina senator, when he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an effort to block civil rights legislation in 1957.Thurmond’s speech – described by his biographer as a “urological mystery” – was reportedly achieved with help of prior steam baths to dehydrate his body and preclude the need for regular bathroom breaks. He was also reported by a staffer to have had himself fitted with a catheter to relieve himself while he spoke. More

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      Abortion measures are on the ballot in 10 states this year. Democrats can win them | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      If you’re tired of breathlessly following the horserace polling of the presidential and congressional races, you might consider instead breathlessly following the horserace polling of ballot initiatives to protect reproductive rights. In a sense, they’re more revealing.Pending some outstanding court challenges from Republicans – whose dogged commitment to “leaving this issue to the states” curiously disappears when they realize they’re going to lose – up to 10 states will have abortion referendums on the ballot this year. And it happens that they’ll share that ballot with competitive Senate races in states like Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Maryland.In Nevada and Arizona, which could also play a decisive role in the presidential race, a Fox News poll found that over 70% of voters in both states plan to vote in favor of codifying abortion rights.Giving voters the opportunity to vote directly on abortion rights is a strategic win for progressives on a few levels. Of course, in a time when 22 state legislatures have acted to restrict abortion access since Dobbs, it’s a powerfully effective way to protect the right to choose. It also helps keep the subject in headlines when the Trump campaign would prefer voters to be distracted by mythical, racist claims about Haitian immigrants. And perhaps most significantly, it could motivate otherwise unenthusiastic voters to show up for what seems to be yet another excruciatingly close election.Ballot initiatives are a useful exercise in revealed preference. It has long been observed that millions of Americans end up voting against their economic self-interest each election cycle. In presidential elections, voters choose candidates, not policy papers. It’s why swing voters were not compelled by the argument that Joe Biden could serve four more years as president because he “surrounds himself with the right people”.Yet when voters have the chance to vote up or down on an issue that will directly impact their lives, they aren’t in the habit of denying themselves civil rights or quality of life improvements. And in the wake of Roe v Wade getting overturned, that has proved especially true.In 2022, every state referendum on abortion was a victory for pro-choice advocates. Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont voted to enshrine reproductive rights in their respective constitutions, while voters in Kentucky and Montana decisively voted down measures that would have restricted them. This coincided with progressive overperformance in gubernatorial and congressional races, where abortion proved highly salient.Ballot initiatives on other issues have also demonstrated sizable majorities for the right progressive priorities, even in so-called conservative states. Since 2012, measures to legalize recreational marijuana have passed in over a dozen states – including Alaska, Montana, Missouri and Ohio. Meanwhile, per Ballotpedia, there have been 22 statewide measures to raise the minimum wage since 1998; they’ve all passed.In this election, too, there are opportunities for waves of support for progress in unexpected places.Take Florida (please). The citizen-led group Floridians Protecting Freedom has been tirelessly pushing for amendment 4, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution if it can garner 60% of the vote. One poll found that the initiative is positioned nicely to pass, with 69% support.Meanwhile, Florida amendment 3, which would legalize marijuana in the state, has already broken the record for the most money spent on any state cannabis measure, with more than $100m raised and counting. On that issue, the Republican party seems to recognize which way the smoke is blowing, since Trump has come out in favor of it.For all the talk of Florida falling out of reach for progressives, these amendments could serve as yet another signal that the left shouldn’t give up on the state. This is the same state that voted to restore the voting rights of more than 1 million felons in 2018 (despite immediate efforts that followed by the Republican government to subvert the will of the people). There is such a sizable bloc for progress, in fact, that despite Florida’s 60% threshold for constitutional amendments being the highest in the country, Republicans have proposed raising it even higher, to 66.67%.Beyond the Sunshine state, putting abortion rights front and center could also help address the Harris campaign’s nationwide challenges with younger voters. While Kamala Harris has managed to earn back some of the support that Biden lost among voters under 30, she still isn’t matching his 2020 performance.Sure, maybe touting Taylor Swift’s endorsement on Instagram or sending Barack Obama to juice voter registration on TikTok will move the needle. But with women under 45 citing abortion as their most motivating issue this election, it would seem wise to keep spotlighting a rare issue that is both persuasive to swing voters and galvanizing for young activists.At the St Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida, the 20-year-old college senior Alexis Hobbs can be found wearing a pink T-shirt behind a pink table recruiting her peers to vote “Yes on 4.”In an interview with New York Magazine, Hobbs shared just how motivated her fellow young people are to fight this fight: “They don’t want to live out their entire adulthood this way.”

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      Harris condemns Trump in Georgia after news of abortion-related deaths

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      In her first speech dedicated exclusively to abortion rights since becoming the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris spoke on Friday afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming Donald Trump for the abortion bans that now blanket much of the United States.Harris spoke days after news broke that two Georgia mothers died after being unable to access legal abortions and adequate medical care in the state.“Two women – and those are only the stories we know – here in the state of Georgia, died, died, because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. She repeatedly referred to “Trump abortion bans” in the speech.“Suffering is happening every day in our country,” Harris continued. “To those women, to those families – I say on behalf on what I believe we all say, we see you and you are not alone and we are all here standing with you.”In the weeks since becoming the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign. She has toured the country to highlight the healthcare consequences of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which paved the way for more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions.On Friday, Harris blamed the former president for Roe’s demise because Trump appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned the landmark decision. She also also condemned Republicans for repeatedly blocking Senate bills that would have guaranteed a federal right to in vitro fertilization, a popular fertility treatment that had its future cast into doubt after Roe’s overturning.“On the one hand, these extremists want to tell women they don’t have the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris said. “On the other hand, these extremists are telling women and their parents they don’t have the freedom to start a family.”The raucous crowd grumbled loudly at Harris’s words. “Make it make sense!” someone shouted.Although Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, becoming the first Democrat in decades to take the state, Democrats seemed unlikely to recapture it until Harris replaced Biden as nominee. Now, Georgia is once again a swing state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and a major Trump surrogate, has said that Trump must win Georgia if he wants to win the White House. Meanwhile, Harris in August embarked on a two-day bus tour of the state and giving her first major network interview there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deaths of the Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, were first reported earlier this week by ProPublica and occurred after Georgia enacted a six-week abortion ban. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee looked at both women’s cases and deemed their deaths “preventable”, according to ProPublica.Although Georgia permits abortions in medical emergencies, doctors across the country have said that abortion exceptions are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable. Instead, doctors have said, they are forced to watch until patients get sick enough to legally intervene.After Thurman took abortion pills to end a pregnancy in 2022, her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue – a rare but potentially devastating complication. Doctors delayed giving the 28-year-old a routine procedure for 20 hours, and she developed sepsis. Her heart stopped during an emergency surgery.“Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed,” Harris said on Friday. “Understand what a law like this means. Doctors have to wait until the patient is at death’s door before they take action.”Harris met with Thurman’s mother and sisters on Thursday night. “Their pain is heartbreaking,” she said.While on the campaign trail, Trump has alternated between bragging about helping to demolish Roe, complaining about how Republicans’ hardline anti-abortion stances have cost the Republican elections, and flip-flopping on his own position on the procedure.Access to abortion has become one of voters’ top issues over the last two years, and Democrats are hoping that outrage over Roe will propel them to victory at the ballot box this November. Ten states, including the key battleground states of Nevada and Arizona, are set to hold abortion-related ballot measures, which could boost turnout among Democrats’ base. More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare to meet on the debate stage in Philadelphia, the battle over abortion rights has vaulted to the center of the 2024 presidential election campaign, the first since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade.At the party’s convention last month, Democrats spotlighted the harrowing stories of women placed in medical peril as a result of post-Roe abortion bans in their states. Last week, the Harris campaign launched a 50-stop “reproductive freedom” bus tour across several battleground states, kicking off in Trump’s “back yard”, miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida.And this weekend, days before the first – and perhaps only – primetime presidential debate, where the issue is likely to be raised, the Harris campaign debuted three new TV ads reminding voters that Trump has repeatedly taking credit for his role in ending the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion. The message is blunt: because of Trump, one in three women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is banned or significantly restricted. And it could get worse, they warn, if Trump is given a second term.“Donald Trump is a fundamental threat to reproductive freedom – and you don’t have to take our word for it – Trump said it himself,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement. “Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in all 50 states because they trust women to make the right decisions for their families.”In the bitterly contested race for the White House, abortion remains a glaring vulnerability for the Republican nominee.“You know it’s an important issue because Trump is trying to change his position,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster.As a candidate, Trump has held conflicting positions on abortion, alternately boasting that he appointed three of the nine supreme court justices whose votes were decisive in overturning Roe, while complaining that Republican extremism on the issue has cost his party at the ballot box.​He recently appeared to endorse a ballot measure to expand abortion rights in his adopted home state of Florida, only to announce one day later – after sparking backlash among prominent conservative groups – that he would vote against it. He has also previously hinted at support for a 15-week federal ban only to insist that the issue should be left to the states. His campaign has said Trump would not sign a national abortion ban as president.While the economy remains the top election issue for voters this November, a New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed that a growing share of battleground state voters, particularly women, say abortion will be central to their decision. Among women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as their single most important issue.In the final months of the campaign, Democrats are aiming to harness the unabated anger over the loss of federal abortion protections, especially among women and young people, and unifying around a platform that seeks to protect what remains of abortion access and the availability of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In polling and focus groups, Lake said abortion rights remains an especially salient issue for women and the issue was helping to fuel a widening gender gap between Harris and Trump. Harris’s vocal support for abortion rights has not only energized young voters, a core Democratic constituency, but is also helping to persuade independent women and, as Lake put it, “older women who remember when abortion was illegal, and don’t think the idea of jailing doctors, investigating miscarriages, [and] eliminating birth control and IVF is a good idea”.View image in fullscreenIn recent weeks, Trump, who has long worried that Republican-led efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict access to reproductive care could imperil his White House bid, has sought recast his approach to the issue. During a town hall even in battleground Wisconsin, he endorsed a plan to make the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF – a type of fertility assistance that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see limited.“We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said.Democrats assailed the proposal as insincere, pointing to the Republican’s record and the positions of his running mate, JD Vance.Trump has had “more positions on reproductive rights than he has had wives”, Ana Navarro, a TV personality and anti-Trump Republican, said last week, at the Florida launch of the Harris campaign’s bus tour.Democrats have leveraged the abortion issue to secure key victories in the 2022 midterms, when mobilization efforts around abortion rights drove strong turnout and enthusiasm, helping the party keep control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House. In Michigan, Democrats secured a governing trifecta as voters in the state overwhelmingly turned out to back a ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution.“Bringing the message to the people, talking with women and healthcare providers and our families, that’s how we had such a historic outcome in our ’22 election here in Michigan,” the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’s campaign, said in an MSNBC interview this week. “But it’s important, even for Michiganders and New Yorkers and Floridians, to know what’s at stake if we have a second Trump presidency.”Some Republicans have argued that the potency of abortion rights would wane in a noisy presidential election. But Lake believes the opposite could be true.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion rights are a priority for young voters who are more likely to turn out in a presidential election year. Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battleground states like Arizona and Nevada as well as Florida, once a presidential bellwether that has trended Republican in recent cycles.“We are the belly of the beast here in the state of Florida,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party. “We are the state that has drastically moved on abortion from two years ago having full access to now being one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.”Florida Democrats are hopeful the ballot initiative will help boost the former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s underdog campaign against the Republican incumbent senator Rick Scott. Elsewhere in the battle for control of the Senate, vulnerable Democratic incumbents Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights.Fried, who joined the Harris campaign kick-off in Palm Beach county last week, said the referendum had helped draw attention to the state – and was mobilizing voters of all political stripes.“If they can take away access to reproductive healthcare, what else is next?” she said. “What other types of rights have we moved the needle on that would be going backwards if Trump is re-elected?”The state’s referendum would overturn the state’s unpopular six-week ban, guaranteeing the right to abortion “before viability”, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. A poll released in mid-August found that 56% of Sunshine state voters support the proposed amendment, just shy of the 60% threshold needed to become law. Yet it drew more support than Trump, who led Harris 51% to 47% in the state, according to the survey.Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue. She holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump in a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Yet there were also signs that Trump’s mixed signals have muddied the waters on the issue. According to the survey, released Sunday, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.Still, the Republican nominee must contend with his base, particularly evangelicals and other conservative Christians, who expect Trump to further restrict access to abortion as president.Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, recently told the Guardian that young conservatives were “shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that”.Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia offers one of the highest-profile opportunities for Harris to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion. Reproductive rights supporters anticipate Harris will challenge the former president over his attempts to shift positions on the issue.“I hope that Vice-President Harris makes it crystal clear for the tens of millions of people who are watching that leaving it to the states is not a moderate position – that it is extreme,” said Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a left-leaning coalition of physicians and medical professionals that recently endorsed Harris.Davidson said voters will also want to hear Harris articulate her vision for expanding access to reproductive healthcare.“We know what Trump did,” he said. “What are we going to do going forward?” More