2024-07-24
6 分钟Activists believe that the vice president, who is already the leading voice for reproductive rights in the Biden administration, will champion their cause.
Today in science from Wired, abortion rights groups rush to back Kamala Harris.
Activists believe that the vice president, who is already the leading voice for reproductive rights in the Biden administration, will champion their cause.
By Emily Mullen 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 Norbesta Flint, president of all, above all, a group that supports public insurance coverage of abortion, in an interview with Wired.
Elisa Wells, co founder 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 healthcare 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 administrations voice for reproductive rights.
In January, she set out on a nationwide tour to highlight the harms of state abortion bansite.
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 healthcare crisis and shared the story of a Wisconsin couple, Megan and Joe, who discovered they were pregnant and that the fetus had a severe genetic disorder that put Megan's life at risk.
Megan 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.