Vice President Kamala Harris joined actress and singer Sheryl Lee Ralph in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to advocate for women's reproductive rights during an official campaign stop.
In a room of approximately 250 people, Vice President Harris shared a personal story to explain why, from an early age, she chose to fight for women and against those who hurt them in an effort to fire up voters about the ongoing threats to women's freedoms.
“Now many of you know I started my career as a prosecutor, but you may not know why. So, when I was in high school, I learned that one of my best friends was being molested by her stepfather, and when I learned that, I said to her, ‘You have to come and stay with us,’” Harris told the crowd. “So, at a young age, I decided I wanted to take on crimes against women and children, and for the majority of my career as a prosecutor, I actually specialized in those kinds of things.”
Abortion
VP Harris talks with Scripps News about protecting abortion access
She promptly continued to assign blame to the Republican Party for the current political climate that has fostered a culture of aggression and the suppression of women.
“So, the idea that these so-called leaders would say, even [with] no exception for rape or incest, to a survivor of a crime of violence to their body, a violation to their body, that you, the survivor of that, don’t have a right to make a decision about what happens to your body next? That’s immoral,” said Harris. “I was just recently in Florida ... six-week ban ... which makes it very clear, by the way, that these so-called leaders are not very clear about how a woman's body works; most women don't know they are pregnant at six weeks. So, either they don't know, or they don't care.”
President Joe Biden and Harris have prioritized abortion access in their reelection campaign. So, it's no surprise that Harris not only holds the entire Republican Party accountable but also took the opportunity to criticize Donald Trump in the process.
“If you want to know who's to blame for where we are right now, a finger can be directly pointed at the former president,” Harris said. “The former president made it very clear and then did what he intended to do: He would pick three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would undo the protections of Roe. And they did exactly as he intended.”
While Trump has criticized some state abortion laws, in a recent Truth Social post, he expressed satisfaction that he was able to overturn Roe. Additionally, in an interview with Time Magazine, he stated that it should be left to the states to decide whether to prosecute women for abortions or to monitor women's pregnancies.
Following the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe in June 2022, 41 states have implemented abortion bans with only limited exceptions, leaving just 9 states and the District of Columbia without restrictions on abortion based on gestational duration, according to data released earlier this month by the Guttmacher Institute.
