Reproductive rights organizations have been quick to come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would drop out of the presidential race and endorse Harris instead.
Harris could be an even stronger proponent for reproductive health care than President Biden, who has been hesitant to speak directly about abortion during his presidency. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has said that he isn’t “big on abortion” and even opposed it in his early days as a senator, but his views have evolved over the years.
“We’re incredibly excited that we have somebody who has a long track record in fighting for abortion access as potentially being the person who’s at the top of the presidential ticket for the Democratic Party,” said Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a group that supports public insurance coverage of abortion, in an interview with WIRED.
Elisa Wells, cofounder of the nonprofit Plan C, which provides information on self-managed, at-home abortion with pills, told WIRED that she expects Harris to bring “strong leadership” on reproductive rights and have a “bold agenda” to restore legal access to abortion.
“Abortion rights groups will certainly be thrilled to have a candidate who will forcefully campaign on reproductive health access,” wrote Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care research organization, in an email to WIRED.
Access to abortion has dwindled across the US following the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old landmark case that protected the right to have an abortion. Three justices appointed by former president Donald Trump—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were among the five who made up the majority opinion to repeal Roe. The decision opened the door for states to ban abortion outright, and more than a dozen have done so.
Since the decision, Vice President Harris has become the Biden administration’s voice for reproductive rights. In January, she set out on a nationwide tour to highlight the harms of state abortion bans. During a kickoff speech for that tour, Harris recounted an event in high school that led her to become a prosecutor specializing in crimes against women and children: She learned that one of her best friends was being sexually abused by her stepfather.
In the speech, she referred to abortion access as a “health care crisis” and shared the story of a Wisconsin couple, Meaghan and Joe, who discovered they were pregnant and that the fetus had a severe genetic disorder that put Meaghan’s life at risk. Meaghan could not get an abortion in Wisconsin and ultimately had to travel to Minnesota to receive care.
At the event, Harris said the Biden administration was fighting to protect women’s access to reproductive care. “We trust women. We trust women to make decisions about their own bodies. We trust women to know what is in their own best interest,” she said.