Vice President Kamala Harris has suggested that former President Donald Trump is to blame for women dying because they could not access abortion care after Roe v. Wave was overturned two years ago.
“This young mother should be alive, raising her son, and pursuing her dream of attending nursing school,” Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said in a statement released Tuesday morning. “This is exactly what we feared when Roe was struck down.”
Harris was referring to Amber Nicole Thurman, a 28-year-old mother who reportedly died in 2022 after a hospital in Georgia delayed lifesaving medical care when she experienced complications from a medication abortion. Thurman’s story was published in a riveting report from ProPublica stating that at least two women died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in Georgia, which has instituted a six-week abortion ban. The ProPublica report focused on Thurman’s death, although the publication said it will share details about the second abortion-related death in the days ahead.
“In more than 20 states, Trump Abortion Bans are preventing doctors from providing basic medical care,” Harris said in her statement. “Women are bleeding out in parking lots, turned away from emergency rooms, losing their ability to ever have children again. Survivors of rape and incest are being told they cannot make decisions about what happens next to their bodies. And now women are dying. These are the consequences of Donald Trump’s actions.”
Harris made similar remarks last week during a presidential debate, reminding voters that Trump nominated three of the conservative Supreme Court justices who rolled back nearly 50 years of federal abortion protections by striking down Roe, the 1973 decision that had legalized abortion across the U.S.
“There is so much at stake in this election, including restoring the freedoms that have been taken away from us,” Harris said Tuesday, promising to sign a bill into law to “restore reproductive freedom” if elected. “If Donald Trump gets the chance, he will sign a national abortion ban, and these horrific realities will multiply.”
Trump has tried to backtrack on his extreme anti-abortion views in recent weeks. The GOP presidential nominee has distanced himself from Project 2025 — a wish list of extreme anti-abortion policy proposals and other agenda items created with the help of many of his longtime allies. He has suggested that he won’t enact a national abortion ban if elected and won’t enforce the Comstock Act, a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law that abortion opponents want to use to criminalize sending abortion pills by mail. But, when pressed on the issue during last week’s presidential debate, Trump refused to say whether he’d veto a national abortion ban.
“This is the reality of being a Black woman seeking care in an anti-abortion America. We are dying,” Monica Simpson, the executive director at SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, said in a statement. “From high rates of maternal mortality to bearing the disproportionate impacts of abortion bans, Black women have endured attacks on our bodily autonomy throughout American history.
“This fight is not new to us,” Simpson said. “But right now, we must fight harder than ever before to defeat extremist politicians who oppose bodily autonomy. We must trust Black women to lead us to a more free future.”
Read more on Thurman at ProPublica .
Local News
