Biden, Harris put abortion rights on election frontline

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will push the fight for abortion rights in a series of events this week, highlighting what Democrats believe is political kryptonite for Donald Trump in November´s election.

Harris is being promoted by the Biden campaign as the face of the reproductive rights issue, delivering a message that if Republican former president Trump makes a comeback, he will seek to impose further restrictions on abortion.

Harris travels to the swing state of Wisconsin to launch a nationwide tour on the issue on Monday, the 51st anniversary of the historic Roe v. Wade court decision legalizing abortion. A conservative-leaning Supreme Court featuring three Trump-appointed judges struck that ruling down in 2022. Biden is meeting experts on reproductive healthcare at the White House. “On this day and every day, Vice President Harris and I are fighting to protect women´s reproductive freedom against Republican officials´ dangerous, extreme, and out-of-touch agenda,” Biden said in a statement Monday. Harris and Biden will then make their first joint appearance on the 2024 campaign trail with a major rally on the issue in Virginia on Tuesday, along with First Lady Jill Biden and “Second Gentleman” Douglas Emhoff, Harris´s husband. Biden´s campaign increasingly sees the issue as a vote winner after Trump repeatedly bragged that he should be given credit for the top US court´s decision to overturn the federally protected right to abortion.

“He is proud. Proud that women across our nation are suffering? Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom?” Harris was to say in Wisconsin according to excerpts released by her office. Since the court´s decision, 14 US states have imposed outright bans on abortion, while seven others have imposed time limits, according to a tracker in the New York Times.

Biden and the other speakers on Tuesday will “underscore what is at stake for reproductive freedom in 2024 — including the threat of a MAGA Republican-led national abortion ban,” the Biden-Harris campaign said. The Biden campaign is also launching television and social media ads targeting swing voters in battleground states, focusing on the “personal impact that Trump´s abortion bans have on women and providers.”

The issue remains a seismic fault line in US politics and society. Thousands of anti-abortion activists rallied in the snow Friday in Washington for an annual “March for Life.”Democrats have particularly seized on the issue after Republicans lost a series of votes centered on abortion rights in off-year elections last year in Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia. Polls repeatedly show a clear majority of Americans support continued access to safe abortion, even as conservative groups push to limit the procedure — or ban it outright.

Democrat campaigners likely would target areas where abortion rights are under threat, as it is not as “broad brush” an issue as migration or crime, Melissa DeRosa, a Democratic strategist, told AFP. “Reproductive freedom is going to be an issue that matters in places where it´s not already secure,” she said. “This is going to be something that´s going to be strategically deployed in areas where it matters.”