Harris bets on a key issue

() – Vice President Kamala Harris adopted a rapid-fire mentality this week to address the key issue of abortion rights.

She referred to the people behind abortion bans as “those hypocrites,” arguing at a hastily arranged campaign rally in Atlanta that some American communities now facing abortion bans have been neglected for years on the issue of maternal care. “Where were you?” she asked.

The intense focus on abortion rights evolved over the week after the nonprofit news agency ProPublica published a report on two Georgia women who died as a result of delays in medical care related to the state’s abortion ban.

On Thursday, the mother of one of the women was in the audience at an event broadcast live from Michigan, recounting her daughter’s tragedy to Harris and Oprah Winfrey.

On Friday, under Harris’ direction, ’s Priscilla Alvarez reports, 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 “Trump’s 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 mobilize voters and get them out to vote,” Alvarez wrote.

Former President Donald Trump 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 the recent election suggest otherwise.

The ProPublica report, along with any number of previous testimonies Democrats presented at their Chicago convention in August, put the issue of abortion rights in sharp relief, 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 showed is extraordinary, because you also just learned how she died,” Harris said during the event in Michigan. ProPublica reported that a state review board that included doctors issued a nonpublic report determining that Thurman’s death was preventable.

Thurman, a mother who planned to study nursing, 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 surgery at a hospital. Doctors waited to operate because the procedure, known as curettage, is now a felony in Georgia unless the mother’s life is in danger.

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 “at death’s door” before treating her.

‘s Brianna Keilar interviewed Dr. Nisha Verma, an OB/GYN 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 where in this continuum of care we can intervene,” Verma said. “There’s no line in the sand where someone goes from completely well to acutely dying.”

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

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

As the patient faced this tragic situation, doctors tried to figure out how sick she would have to become before they could treat her.

“This has compounded their suffering in an already dire situation,” Verma said.

In a New York Times-Siena College poll of likely voters that found the national race to be a dead heat, abortion rights is one issue where Harris has an edge: 54 percent of likely voters are confident she will do a better job on abortion rights, versus 41 percent who trust Trump. On other key issues in the poll, such as the economy, Trump has an edge.

Harris’s strength on abortion rights rests on key constituencies she expects to support her en masse on Election Day. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, nearly three-quarters said they trusted Harris on the issue. Among Black voters, 83% trust Harris, and among Hispanic voters, 63%.

Compared with white likely voters, black and Hispanic voters were more likely in the poll to say 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 bill appears unlikely to pass the U.S. Senate, where a 60-vote majority would likely be needed 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 widened since Harris replaced Biden, according to the KFF poll.

Will men take abortion rights into account when voting?

Abortion rights may not be an issue that motivates men. But ‘s Arit John, Eva McKend and David Wright reported that by framing abortion rights as a matter of personal freedom and featuring real-life testimonies from women affected by abortion bans alongside 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.