(CNN) – Vice President Kamala Harris this week adopted a rapid-response mentality to address the key issue of abortion rights.
Referring to the people behind abortion bans as “those hypocrites,” he argued at a hastily organized 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 attention paid to abortion rights evolved throughout 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 ban. of abortion in the state.
This 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.
This Friday, under Harris’ direction, CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez reports, the campaign had planned a last-minute rally in Georgia, where Harris spoke in front of signs arguing that a third of women live under the “abortion ban of Trump,” a phrase he repeated throughout the speech.
“It’s reminiscent of the kind of quickly organized trip that put Harris at the center of then-President Joe Biden’s re-election effort and an example of the kinds of moments her campaign is seizing to elevate — and amplify — issues it believes will mobilize to voters and will encourage them to vote,” Álvarez 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.
ProPublica’s reporting, along with any number of previous testimony that Democrats presented at their Chicago convention in August, put a spotlight on the issue of abortion rights, particularly in states where restrictions are in place, including 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 all of you 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 non-public report finding 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 hospital intervention. Doctors waited to operate because the procedure, known as uterine 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.
CNN’s Brianna Keilar interviewed Dr. Nisha Verma, an obstetrician-gynecologist 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 is no line in the sand where someone goes from completely well to acutely dying.”
“It’s really not clear based on that law, based on that exception for medical emergencies, when we can intervene in each 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.
While the patient was facing this tragic situation, the doctors were trying to figure out how sick she would have to be to be able to care for her.
“This compounded their suffering in an already terrible situation,” Verma said.
In a poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College among likely voters, which revealed a tie in the national race, abortion rights is an issue on which Harris has an advantage: 54% of likely voters trust her she will do a better job on abortion rights, compared to the 41% who trust Trump. On other key issues in the poll, such as the economy, Trump has an advantage.
Harris’ strength on abortion rights rests on key groups she hopes will support her en masse on Election Day. Among 18- to 29-year-olds, nearly three-quarters said they trusted Harris on this 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 survey to say they think Trump will try to pass a national abortion ban. Trump has said he won’t do it.
A majority of voters, 61% in a KFF poll released this month, said they would prefer a federal law that would restore abortion rights nationwide, although such a law appears unlikely to pass the Senate. in the US, 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.
As expected, voters are more likely to say they trust the Democratic candidate to manage abortion rights than the Republican, but it is an advantage that has increased since Harris replaced Biden, according to the KFF survey.
Will men take the right to abortion into account when voting?
Abortion rights may not be an issue that motivates men. But CNN’s Arit John, Eva McKend and David Wright reported that by framing abortion rights as a matter of personal freedom and featuring real testimonies from women affected by the abortion ban along with their spouses, the Harris campaign has attempted to make it more relevant to male voters during a reproductive freedom bus tour this week in the key state of Pennsylvania.
