Vice President Kamala Harris will give remarks in Atlanta on Friday focused on the stories of two Georgia mothers whose deaths she has argued show the consequences of the strict abortion bans passed by Republicans after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
The speech is part of an effort by the Harris campaign to push reproductive rights to the center of the presidential election, according to a person with knowledge of the event who insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the plans.
The deaths, reported this week by ProPublica, occurred in the months after Georgia passed a law banning abortion at six weeks. Amber Thurman died of sepsis resulting from an incomplete medication abortion after waiting 20 hours in a suburban Atlanta hospital for medical care. A second woman, Candi Miller, died after declining to seek medical care for complications from abortion medication.
Throughout her campaign, Ms. Harris has sought to tie former President Donald J. Trump, who has taken credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who provided the key votes to overturn the federal right to abortion, to dire medical situations faced by women seeking the procedure in states where it is banned or heavily restricted.
Over the past week, Ms. Harris and her campaign have repeatedly highlighted the deaths of the two women in Georgia, a crucial presidential battleground. Her campaign hammered Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, for skipping a Senate vote on legislation protecting access to in vitro fertilization, or I.V.F.
And it released a new ad featuring a gutting testimonial from Hadley Duvall, a survivor of sexual abuse who was impregnated by her stepfather at age 12. She miscarried but, as a young adult, has become a prominent advocate for abortion rights, particularly in her home state of Kentucky, where the Republican-led legislature passed a ban on the procedure with no exceptions for rape or incest.
“I can’t imagine not having a choice,” she said of her pregnancy, in a speech at the Democratic National Convention.
On Thursday, Ms. Duvall will appear with Ms. Harris at a virtual event with Oprah Winfrey.
Abortion rights have dominated American politics since Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022, transforming a once-sleepy debate over whether a woman can legally terminate a pregnancy into a driving electoral force. In campaigns across the country, Democrats have embraced the personal stories of women facing life-threatening medical complications to highlight the impacts of new restrictions on abortion rights and access.
Aides say Ms. Harris believes appearing at the site of these bans — rushing into the fire of weighty issues, as they describe it — is an important way to leverage the power of her bully pulpit. She traveled to Arizona and Iowa shortly after those states enacted restrictions, and was the first sitting vice president to visit the site of an abortion clinic.
In her remarks on Friday, Ms. Harris will call for restoring federal abortion rights and cite the women’s deaths as illustrating the devastating impacts of what she calls “Trump Abortion Bans,” according to the person with knowledge of her remarks.
“Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again,” she said in a statement about ProPublica’s reporting earlier this week. “And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
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