(LifeSiteNews) — Vice President Kamala Harris tied former President Donald Trump to the 2022 overturn of Roe v. Wade in a recent interview, offering a preview of one of the Democrats’ favorite talking points going into the 2024 elections.
“The previous president expressed his intentions quite clearly. And fast forward to just recently, says he’s proud of what he did,” Harris told CNN’s Laura Coates. “By inference, he is proud that women have been deprived of fundamental freedoms to make decisions about their own body; by inference, proud that doctors are being penalized and criminalized for providing health care, proud that women are silently suffering because they don’t have access to the health care they need. So, let’s understand that the stakes are so very high.”
Harris was referring to Trump’s recent comments at a Fox News town hall where he said of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling overturning Roe and allowing states to directly ban abortion, “nobody else was going to get that done but me, and we did it, and we did something that was a miracle.” Trump appointed three of the five justices who voted to overturn from a list of jurists assembled by conservative legal scholars. During that event, Trump went on to criticize the heartbeat laws enabled by that decision and reiterate his desire for an abortion compromise that would “make people happy” on both sides.
Regardless, Democrats’ decision to make abortion one of their main talking points for driving left-wing turnout to reelect President Joe Biden indicates that Trump’s efforts to moderate on the issue will not change the overall narrative of the race. The Biden-Harris campaign recently released an ad in which Texas OB-GYN Dr. Austin Dennard lectures on the supposed “need” for abortion, citing her own experience aborting a baby diagnosed with anencephaly.
Biden has called for Congress to send to his desk a federal law that would “codify Roe v. Wade to protect every woman’s constitutional right to choose” abortion, such as the Women’s Health Protection Act or Freedom of Choice Act, either of which would not only prohibit state-level abortion bans but make it impossible for states to enact any meaningful limits or regulations on abortion.
Biden has further boasted that his administration has “launched a whole-of-government effort to protect reproductive rights” (a popular euphemism for legal abortion on demand), including increased taxpayer funding for abortion at home and abroad and attempted waiving of federal safety rules against distributing abortion pills by mail.
In past pro-abortion comments, Harris has called it “immoral” to protect babies conceived in rape, omitted the word “life” from her invocation of the Declaration of Independence, and refused to identify any acceptable cutoff point for legal abortion.
Trump maintains a commanding lead for the Republican presidential nomination, and won his first primary victory on January 15 in the Iowa caucuses, picking up 51% of the vote and 20 delegates to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s 21 percent and nine delegates, and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley’s 19 percent and eight delegates. In the following days, DeSantis and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy both dropped out and endorsed Trump, leaving Haley the sole remaining GOP alternative.
Fluctuating national polls currently have Trump narrowly leading a close race with Biden should the former president be nominated, although voters also say that potential convictions in his various ongoing trials will make them less likely to support him. It’s also speculated that Democrats may replace Biden with a younger Democrat such as Gavin Newsom or Dean Phillips, and it is not yet certain which candidate would lose more votes to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential run.