Harris criticizes Vance over abortion and IVF in Michigan

While Joe Biden’s presidential campaign still suffers from the weight of his weak debate performance against Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris continues her campaign to win over voters in a big tent for reproductive health and abortion rights. This time, she had a new focus: Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance.

On Wednesday, Harris met in Michigan for a conversation – her second on reproductive rights this year – with Amanda Stratton, a “conservative, pro-choice woman” and mother, and Olivia Troye, a self-described “recovering Republican” who served as a national security official in the Trump administration.

Harris began her remarks by expressing relief that Trump had survived Saturday’s assassination attempt, calling it a “heinous and cowardly act.”

“After this weekend’s shooting, one of the questions we face now is how we should treat each other in this election campaign,” Harris said, before echoing Biden’s remarks from Sunday night in which he condemned political violence and said it was “never acceptable.”

“At the same time, the hallmark of American democracy – the hallmark of any democracy – is a vigorous competition of ideas, policies and visions for the future,” Harris said. “And just as we must reject political violence, we must also have a serious discussion about what is at stake in this election. The surest way to affirm the strength of our democracy is through a vigorous and civilized exchange of ideas.”

“I don’t think we would have been talking about reproductive rights and voting 10, five, or maybe even two years ago because the issue was seen as too controversial, not promising – and frankly, it already seemed like the law,” Troye said.

“I’ve heard so many stories about women and their partners, their husbands and their families suffering in silence,” Harris said. A key to her political outlook is considering how a particular policy impacts a real human being – in this case, a mother who has become pregnant and needs an abortion but lives in a state with strict, restrictive abortion laws. “So think about what we’re telling her: God help her if she has extra money to buy a plane ticket and a hotel room … to go to a city she’s never been to to get that care, only to get back as soon as possible because she’s got to take care of these children,” she said. “Think about what we’re putting people through.”

Stratton, a mother who shared her experience with miscarriage and secondary infertility – infertility in pregnancies after the first birth – said she found her experiences to be common but rarely talked about them. And although her question veered away from miscarriage, Harris later returned to it, pointing out that Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance has blocked protections for IVF and signaled his support for a national abortion ban.

In a 2022 podcast interview, Vance said he would like to see abortion illegal nationwide, saying a patchwork of state-by-state abortion laws wouldn’t work. “Let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overturned. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or say 2024. And then George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus every day to load disproportionate numbers of black women to get abortions in California. And of course the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity.”

Vance has since adopted Trump’s stance that abortion is a state-level issue, but he said a successful voter-backed 2023 measure that would have included a constitutional amendment protecting abortion was a “punch in the gut.”

When it comes to abortion, Harris noted, pro-abortion supporters tend to prevail.

“I’ve traveled around the country, traveled to so-called ‘red’ states, so-called ‘blue’ states, so-called ‘purple’ states. Look at this, when this issue has come to a vote … whenever it’s come to a vote, the American people have voted for freedom,” Harris said. “Over the last few years, we’ve seen such division and attempts to divide us — this is a very, very serious, central, fundamental issue — but what we’ve seen is that the American people, when confronted with this issue, regardless of which party they’re registered with, stand for freedom.”

Harris concluded her conversation with Stratton and Troye with a discussion about promoting voter engagement and coalitions.

“You know, there are forces that are trying to divide us. We need to remember in our hearts and help people remember that the vast majority of us have so much more in common than what divides us,” Harris said. “Sometimes those kinds of sentiments have the tendency, if not the intent, to make people feel small and alone and disempower them… You know, I think there’s this perversity that’s taken place in recent years of saying that the strength of a leader is measured by who you put down. When in fact, the true measure of the strength of a leader, I think we can all agree, is measured by who you support.”