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Kamala Harris is laying the deaths of two Georgia women at the feet of Donald Trump.
During a campaign stop in Atlanta on Friday, an impassioned Harris tied Trump’s appointment of three conservative Supreme Court justices key to overturning Roe v. Wade to the deaths of two women in the state. ProPublica reported this week the women were denied or afraid to seek emergency medical care because of Georgia’s ban on abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.
The vice president warned what happened in Georgia would become only more common in a second Trump presidency.
“Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know here in the state of Georgia — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. “The reality is, for every story we hear of the suffering under Trump abortion bans, there are so many of the stories we’re not hearing, but where suffering is happening every day in our country.”
It’s the vice president’s latest attempt to hold Trump responsible for the near-total abortion bans that have taken effect in more than a third of states since Roe’s fall. For weeks, she has been highlighting stories of women who were denied abortions in emergency situations and families who have struggled to receive fertility care, like in vitro fertilization, to demonstrate the sweeping consequences of such laws.
Democrats are banking on concerns about abortion and reproductive health care driving voters to the ballot box in the same way it did during the midterm elections — and as they work to counter Trump on issues more favorable to the former president, like the economy and immigration.
Trump has tried to neutralize the abortion issue, which has dogged Republicans, by embracing a leave-it-to-the states approach. He has also called a six-week abortion ban in Florida — a law similar to Georgia’s — “too short,” said he supports exceptions to abortion bans in cases of rape and incest and to save the life of the mother and said he would not sign a national abortion ban into law, though he has also not said whether he would veto such a bill.
“President Trump has always supported exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother, which Georgia’s law provides. With those exceptions in place, it’s unclear why doctors did not swiftly act to protect the lives of mothers,” Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement. “President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion and has been very clear that he will NOT sign a federal ban when he is back in the White House.”
But at Friday’s rally, Harris sought to undercut each of those arguments. She pointed to the Georgia deaths as a consequence of leaving abortion in the hands of state lawmakers. She said Trump’s recent pledge to vote against an abortion-rights ballot measure in Florida — which would enshrine the right to abortion until fetal viability in the state constitution — would preserve the state’s six-week abortion ban. And she warned of the possibility that Trump could still sign a national abortion ban.
“Let’s understand, if he is elected again as president, Donald Trump will go further. We know what we’re up against, and we must speak of the stakes,” Harris said.
She also laced into conservative Southern lawmakers for passing strict abortion bans while they continue to grapple with high rates of maternal mortality, one of Harris’ policy priorities. Every state in the South except Virginia restricts abortion access either at conception or after six weeks of pregnancy, a point at which most people don’t know they’re pregnant.
“These hypocrites want to start talking about, this is in the best interest of women and children. Well, where you been? Where you been when it comes to taking care of the women and children of America” Harris said. “Where you been? How dare they. How dare they. Come on.”
Even before she became the Democratic presidential nominee, the White House frequently deployed Harris to speak to the sweeping impacts of state abortion bans over the last two years, including in Indiana, Iowa and Arizona.
But her Friday remarks underscored how Harris has deviated from President Joe Biden and other Democrats in one subtle but key way on abortion. She is not only talking about the stories of rape survivors or women with wanted but unviable pregnancies, but also those of women who want abortions for other reasons. The Democratic National Convention for the first time last month highlighted one such story, and the Georgia women represent two more.
Harris spent more than six minutes during the Atlanta event sharing the story of 28-year-old Amber Nicole Thurman, who required emergency care after she was prescribed abortion pills out of state but failed to expel all the fetal tissue from her body. However, because of Georgia’s abortion ban, doctors delayed operating on her for 20 hours, at which point it was too late.
“We will speak her name,” Harris said, leading the crowd in a chant of, “Amber Rose Thurman.”
The other woman who died, Candi Miller, a 41-year-old mother of three, ordered abortion pills online to terminate her pregnancy because she was fearful of the health risks of carrying the baby to term with multiple chronic conditions, according to ProPublica. But she was afraid to go to the hospital when she similarly failed to expel all the fetal tissue and died at home in her bed.
A state maternal health review board ruled that both deaths were preventable, ProPublica reported.
Harris, the first vice president to visit an abortion clinic, has long been a more comfortable and savvy messenger on abortion than Biden, who was uncomfortable even saying the word. She met with Thurman’s family, including her mother Shannette Williams, before a livestream event with Oprah Winfrey Thursday evening in Michigan.
Anti-abortion groups, like their counterparts on the left, have decried Thurman and Miller’s deaths. But they blame the doctors who failed to provide emergency medical care and the abortion pills themselves — not Georgia’s abortion ban.
“We mourn the senseless loss of Amber, Candi, and their unborn children. We agree their deaths were preventable,” said Katie Daniel, SBA Pro-Life America’s state policy director, in a statement. “But let’s be absolutely clear: Georgia’s law and every pro-life state law calls on doctors to act in circumstances just like theirs.”
But doctors across the country have complained that medical exceptions in state abortion bans aren’t clear enough about when and whether they can terminate pregnancies in emergency situations — and are fearful of the penalties they face if their medical judgment is second guessed in court. In Texas, performing an abortion is a felony punishable by up to life in prison and a $100,000 fine.
It’s in many cases created a chilling effect — with doctors afraid to treat patients even when they believe they should — that has led to pregnant patients in medical emergencies being turned away from hospitals or forced to wait until their situation worsens to receive medical care, like in Thurman’s case. (Medical associations and the FDA have also vouched for mifepristone’s documented safety and noted that it has a lower rate of complications than other widely used drugs like Tylenol and Viagra.)
Harris highlighted some of doctors’ concerns during a live-streamed conversation with Oprah in Detroit Thursday night. And she echoed them at Friday’s rally in Georgia.
“Trump and his running mate, they’ll talk about, ‘But I do believe in the exceptions to save the mother’s life.’ OK, let’s break that down, shall we? Let’s break that down,” she said. “We’re saying that we’re going to create public policy that says that a doctor, a health care provider, will only kick in to give the care that somebody needs if they’re about to die? Think about what we are saying right now.”
On each night of the Democratic National Convention last month, women shared their abortion stories from the main stage. They included three women — Amanda Zurawski, Kaitlyn Joshua and Hadley Duvall — who have emerged as key surrogates in the Harris campaign’s effort to demonstrate why Trump’s leave-abortion-to-the-states approach is insufficient and poses barriers to people receiving needed medical care.
The Harris campaign released an ad this week featuring Duvall, who became pregnant by her stepfather at age 12 and miscarried. And the Reproductive Freedom for All Freedom Fund on Friday launched an ad featuring Thurman’s story, backed by a six-figure buy.
Harris also criticized Senate Republicans for this week again blocking legislation that would protect access to IVF. Senate Democrats have been pushing the bill since an Alabama Supreme Court decision earlier this year briefly halted some IVF treatments in the state, but Republicans have argued the bill goes too far.
“Now consider, among the multitude of ironies, the fact that on the one hand, these extremists want to tell women they don’t have the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris said, “and on the other hand, these extremists are telling women and their partners they don’t have the freedom to start a family.”
