(Bloomberg) -- Vice President Kamala Harris spotlighted the death of a woman in Georgia who was unable to obtain access to a legal abortion, laying the blame on Donald Trump and his role in the US Supreme Court overturning protections for the procedure.
“This is a health-care crisis, and Donald Trump is the architect,” Harris said during a rally in the metro Atlanta area Friday, taking her pitch to protect women’s reproductive rights to a swing state where Democrats are using the issue to rally suburban women and independents to the polls.
“He brags about overturning Roe v. Wade. In his own words — quote — ‘I did it, and I’m proud to have done it,’” Harris continued, casting Trump as “proud that women are dying, proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care, proud that young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers.”
Harris referred to state restrictions on abortion rights as “Trump abortion bans” and said one in three women in America live under such laws. And she assailed the former president for saying he would vote to preserve a Florida law that limited abortion in the state to the first six weeks of a pregnancy.
The Democratic presidential nominee discussed the case of Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year old mother, who died in 2022 from an infection arising from an abortion.
Thurman’s case was documented in a ProPublica investigation that found that under Georgia’s abortion ban, at least two women in the state died after failing to get medical care in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Roe. That court decision led to states across the country imposing restrictions on abortion and making reproductive health a defining issue of the 2024 presidential race. The report cast Thurman as the first abortion-related death that officials deemed preventable.
“We knew that this could happen. There is the word preventable and there is another word — predictable,” Harris said.
The vice president delivered the remarks a day after she met with the family of Thurman during a town hall with talk-show icon Oprah Winfrey in Michigan. At the town hall, Thurman’s mother said her daughter “was not a statistic” but a real person.
Harris on Friday said she had promised Thurman’s mother that “Amber is not just remembered as a statistic.”
Abortion is an issue that has put Trump on the defensive. As president, he nominated three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe and has used that to solidify his standing with evangelical voters and his grip on the Republican party. But with polls showing that Americans at large support abortion rights, Trump has also sought to neutralize the issue in part by re-branding himself as a champion of reproductive rights.
That pivot has highlighted how the issue is an electoral liability for the former president and has sparked criticism from both Democrats who call him insincere and religious voters who are worried he will soften on the issue.
During their lone scheduled debate so far, Harris repeatedly pressed Trump on whether he would veto a bill imposing a national ban on abortion — a question the Republican nominee deflected by saying he “wouldn’t have to,” insisting the issue is now up to the states.
Trump’s messaging on abortion has been inconsistent. He’s said he was open to restricting access to mifepristone, a pill used in medical abortions. Trump has also vowed to mandate that the federal government or insurance companies cover the entire costs of in vitro fertilization.
Harris has vowed to sign into law a measure that restores Roe’s protections and said that if Trump was elected again “I am certain he will sign a national abortion ban.”
“I’m trying to get another debate but we’ll see,” Harris said on Friday. Trump has ruled out another debate against Harris, claiming he won their showdown even as polls show voters deemed the Democrat had the better performance.
Georgia has been a hotly contested battleground, one that Biden won in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes and where Trump is accused of leading a conspiracy to stay in office.
An August Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Harris leading Trump in Georgia, 49% to 47%. Harris has ramped up her campaigning in the state, including a recent bus tour that sought to court people in rural communities and disaffected Republicans.
On Friday, the Georgia State Election Board approved a controversial new rule requiring all ballots to be hand-counted at each of the state’s polling sites — a move that threatens to delay reporting of the state’s election results and raises concerns about ballot security.
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