Last week, another Trump abortion ban took effect. As the State of Iowa joined the growing ranks of Republican-led states banning abortion at six weeks, Iowans woke up to new realities of state-forced birth, where the government controls private medical decisions for over half the state’s population.
Vice President Kamala Harris also woke up to a new reality. After President Joe Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris as the 2024 Democratic nominee, Harris and associated PACs raised an historic $250 million in campaign donations in under three days, much of it from first-time donors, and young voter registration surged by 700%.
Anyone missing the connection between former president Donald Trump’s abortion bans and the drumbeat for Harris isn’t paying attention.
Harris won’t let Trump/Vance flip the script on abortion
Although abortion was carefully scripted out of the headlines and speeches at the Republican National Convention, Harris will remind Americans how Trump bragged about overturning Roe v. Wade, and appointed three radical justices who were willing to lie to Congress under oath — and trash the credibility of the Supreme Court in the process — to overturn abortion rights.
Harris will remind voters how Trump publicly congratulated himself on his social media platform Truth Social, bragging in writing that:
“After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v. Wade, much to the ‘shock’ of everyone… Without me, there would be no 6 weeks, 10 weeks, 15 weeks, or whatever is finally agreed to. Without me the pro-Life movement would have just kept losing. Thank you President TRUMP!!!”
Indeed, thank you Donald Trump, for confirming in writing that you’re responsible for life-threatening, six-week abortion bans, you’re responsible for forcing women and girls to flee their home states to stay alive, you’re responsible for Republicans gunning for armed menstruation police, and you’re responsible for pushing frightened women to the brink of death before doctors can intervene to save them.
Very well done, Sir. Bragging about the Dobbs decision was probably the most consequential self-own you will ever make.
Why Trump/Vance efforts to “soften” state forced birth won’t work
Faced with opinion polls showing that a strong majority of Americans think Trump overturning Roe v. Wade was a “bad thing,” Trump is now marketing a softer position on abortion, saying that rather than a national ban, it should be left up to individual states to decide. Republican VP candidate and antiabortion extremist JD Vance — who would criminalize abortion even in cases of rape and incest because “two wrongs don’t make a right” and who thinks “childless cat ladies” should not equally participate in democracy — now parrots Trump’s “softening,”
Letting states decide via popular vote whether women — or the government — should make private health care decisions is more gaslighting than softening. Under the 14th Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States have been entitled to the same Equal Protection under the law since 1866, regardless of popular whim. The whole point of the 14th Amendment was to remove fundamental human rights from the vicissitudes of popular opinion, which, as MAGA illustrates, is easily manipulated.
The 14th Amendment prohibits all states from making or enforcing any law that denies the equal protection of the laws to all citizens, or that deprives any person of liberty without due process of law; it does not subject these rights to periodic revision as popular opinion fluctuates. When writing Dobbs, lifelong misogynist Justice Samuel Alito wrote deceptively that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause could not protect women’s medical privacy, or abortion access, because “that theory is squarely foreclosed by the Court’s precedents, which establish that a State’s regulation of abortion is not a sex-based classification.”
In case you missed it, that was Alito selectively choosing to prioritize the Court’s “classification precedent” over 50 years of substantive due process precedent to reach his desired outcome, despite Roe’s determination that a woman’s decision to terminate her pregnancy is a “liberty” protected against state interference by the Due Process and Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Harris will stop the gaslighting
Helping themselves to Alito’s smug and dishonest dismissal of equal protection for women, Trump/Vance’s “let-each-state-decide” abortion stance subjects women’s bodies and lives to the whims of popular vote. After owning Miss USA and similar beauty pageants for decades, it’s not surprising that Trump continues to see women’s bodies on a catwalk, subject to popular opinion and scorecards. Harris will serve it back in ways Biden never could, due to Biden’s Catholic reluctance to say the word “abortion” in public.
Harris isn’t reluctant. She has read, and understands, the assignment. She can communicate how abortion bans have increased maternal and infant mortality, and decreased women’s equal opportunity to earn a living. She can explain how Republicans have unconstitutionally stripped half the U.S. population of Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment because Trump justices said they could.
Believed to be the first vice president ever to visit an abortion clinic, Harris talks about abortion rights clearly, forcefully and unapologetically, and will help shape abortion into the pivotal issue in November.
In stepping away from power despite his strong conviction that he could and should serve a second term, President Biden displayed as selfless an act of sacrifice and patriotism as any president since George Washington. As heart-wrenching as it was to watch his Oval Office address explaining his decision, women who have had it up to here with Republicans’ cruel machinations under Dobbs are grateful finally to have a fierce messenger.
Sabrina Haake is a federal trial lawyer, specializing in 1st and 14th Amendment defense. She writes the Substack newsletter The Haake Take.
