Kamala Harris Promises to Impose Abortion on All 50 States as President
By: Ben Johnson, originally published August 23, 2024, The Washington Stand
Kamala Harris promised to use the federal government to expand abortion nationwide, because Americans cannot “truly be prosperous” without abortion, and pro-life Americans are “out of their minds,” said Harris while accepting the Democratic presidential nomination Thursday night.
Harris basked in the glow of the audience as she stood at the podium of the United Center in Chicago to deliver an acceptance speech long on personal history but slight on policy specifics, aside from a vow to extend the abortion industry into all 50 states, irrespective of each state’s individual laws.
“When Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law,” candidate Harris vowed.
Jarringly, as Harris made those remarks, the official DNC video feed of the acceptance speech panned out to feature a baby in the crowd.
Although Harris did not name a specific bill, the Biden-Harris administration has endorsed, the so-called “Women’s Health Protection” Act, which goes far beyond the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling by striking down more than 1,300 state pro-life protections including laws:
- Prohibiting sex-selective abortions;
- Barring many abortions after viability;
- Preventing abortions on babies 20 weeks or older, who are capable of feeling pain;
- Disallowing abortions undertaken without parental consent or notification;
- Prohibiting telemedicine abortion drug prescriptions, which involve no in-person medical examination;
- Banning unlicensed individuals from carrying out abortions;
- Allowing pregnant mothers to receive scientifically accurate information about their babies’ development, or to see an ultrasound or hear the child’s fetal heartbeat; and
- Allowing pro-life medical professionals the right to refuse to participate in an abortion.
A more modest national abortion expansion bill, dubbed the Reproductive Choice Act co-sponsored by Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), would reestablish the guidelines of the Roe and Casey decisions. However, Senate Democrats and the Biden-Harris administration have favored the more sweeping, top-down WHP bill.
The abortion issue emerged as the convention’s defining issue, referred to by one speaker after another. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), an outspoken advocate of national abortion expansion and regulation of pro-life pregnancy resource centers, promised earlier in the evening that Kamala Harris will “take on the right-wing extremists who think they should decide who has access to abortion or IVF. Kamala will protect abortion rights nationwide.” Warren inadvertently put abortion in a separate category from health care, stating that the Democratic Party’s agenda consisted of “groceries, gas, housing, health care, taxes, abortion.” Earlier in the evening, former Rep. Gabrielle Gifford of Arizona, who was shot while in office, said, “Kamala can beat the gun lobby. … She will protect abortion access!”
Harris’s acceptance speech signaled a further break with past candidates such as President Bill Clinton, who spoke on Wednesday night; as candidate, Clinton said abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Harris, who has spent much of the last two years since the Dobbs decision as the White House point person on abortion, extolled abortion as a vital component of American liberty.
“I believe America cannot truly be prosperous unless Americans are fully able to make their own decisions about their own lives,” said Harris moments before invoking “reproductive freedom,” the convention’s preferred euphemism for abortion-on-demand. Her words echoed those of Oprah Winfrey on Thursday night that abortion is part of “the American dream.”
Pro-life advocates pushed back forcefully on the notion. “Not being allowed to kill your child does not equate to slavery,” responded Bryan Kemper, an Ohio-based pro-life advocate.
In office, Harris has seen her administration give the green light for abortionists to mail the abortion pill, mifepristone, to pro-life states in violation of federal law and furnish taxpayer-funded leave to pregnant members of the military who travel out of pro-life states to undergo an abortion.
Moments after promising to allow surgical abortion throughout the country, Harris slammed her political opponents for pro-life positions they never adopted. “We know, and we know what a second Trump term would look like. It’s all laid out in Project 2025,” insisted Harris, although CNN’s fact-checker ranked Democrats’ continual references to the Heritage Foundation project — which President Trump has publicly disdained — false.
Trump “and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress,” Harris claimed. “And get this — get this! He plans to create a national anti-abortion coordinator, and force states to report on women’s miscarriages and abortions.”
“Simply put, they are out of their minds,” Harris thundered.
The demur 2024 Republican Party platform does not promise to enact any federal pro-life protection and leaves all new legislation protecting the unborn to the states, a position President Trump has reiterated consistently. His campaign and allies denied Harris’s allegations. “Fact Check: there is no circumstance in which Trump wants to track and monitor miscarriages,” retorted Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah). “President Trump has REPEATEDLY stated he will not sign a federal abortion ban. Kamala is a liar,” said Trump 2024 National Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.
Yet Harris’s speech indicates efforts to distance the GOP from the pro-life issue have failed, and that the Democrats see abortion as anything but a state issue.
In economic policy, Harris vowed, “We will pass a middle-class tax cut that will benefit more than 100 million Americans.” To date, the Biden-Harris administration has proposed $7 trillion in tax hikes, according to the Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
She also promised “to create jobs, to grow our economy and to lower the cost of everyday needs like health care and housing and groceries,” as well as to “end America’s housing shortage, and protect Social Security and Medicare.” The Biden-Harris administration presided over near-record inflation levels that peaked at 9.1% in June 2022, increasing the prices of all household staples. “A loaf of bread costs 50% more today than it did before the pandemic,” admitted Harris last Friday. “Ground beef is up almost 50%.” The price of a gallon of gasoline has increased from $2.33 in January 2021 to $3.62. “It costs a family an extra $13,300 per year for the same house compared to January 2021,” reported Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation.
Harris accused President Trump of seeking to enact “a national sales tax, call it a Trump tax, that would raise prices on middle-class families.” She is referring to his statement that he may consider an across-the-board tariff on foreign-made goods.
Like the Democratic campaign before President Joe Biden exited the race, much of the party’s rhetoric aims at demonizing President Donald Trump and placing him beyond the pale as a figure committed to overturning “our democracy.”
“The consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” Harris insisted on Thursday night. “He sent an armed mob to the U.S. Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers. When politicians in his own party begged him to call off the mob and send help, he did the opposite — he fanned the flames.” In fact, President Trump encouraged marchers to walk to the Capitol “peacefully” and posted a video online asking them to disperse — a video online platforms later suppressed or removed.
“Consider what he intends to do if we give him power again. Consider his explicit intent to set free violent extremists who assaulted those law enforcement officers at the Capitol; his explicit intent to jail journalists, political opponents, and anyone he sees as the enemy; his explicit intent to deploy our active-duty military against our own citizens,” said Harris.
The threat her opponent may lock up journalists rang hollow to investigator David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress. Daleiden and Sandra Merritt published undercover videos showing officials at the highest levels of Planned Parenthood describing how they perform a potentially illegal partial birth abortion to harvest and sell aborted babies’ organs to scientific researchers. After pushback from the abortion industry, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris prosecuted the undercover reporters for filming Planned Parenthood without their express permission—something Daleiden’s lawyer, Harmeet Dhillon, likened to “60 Minutes” investigations.
Daleiden accused Harris of being “‘unburdened by what has been’ in 2016.” Daleiden reminded Harris, “As a citizen journalist, I had my home raided, work product seized at gunpoint, and spent an afternoon behind bars because of your fealty to” Planned Parenthood.
Harris attempted to appeal to moderate and undecided voters, promising to abide by the rule of law. “I know there are people of various political views watching tonight. And I want you to know, I promise to be a president for all Americans. You can always trust me to put country above party and self,” Harris proclaimed.
That echoes a promise repeatedly made at the outset of the Biden-Harris administration, which critics say turned out to be false. “I will work as hard for those who didn’t vote for me as those who did,” Biden promised just one day after the media declared him winner of the 2020 election. Biden made the same promise in his inaugural address.
Once in power, the Biden-Harris administration oversaw the first FBI raid on the home of a former president, prosecuted peaceful pro-life advocates such as Mark Houck, and attempted to recruit informants inside traditional Roman Catholic churches. This administration’s targeting of its political enemies has become so outlandish that the House Judiciary Committee formed a subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to investigate it on a case-by-case basis.
Harris’s critics, especially her Republican opponent, noted that Harris has attempted to distance herself from her own record over the last three years, and to feign powerlessness as the sitting vice president of the United States.
“Why didn’t she do the things that she’s complaining about?” asked Trump immediately after the speech on Fox News “She could have done it three and a half years ago … and she could still do them. She’s got four-and-a-half, five months left.”
“She didn’t talk about China. She didn’t talk about fracking. She didn’t talk about crime. … She didn’t talk about housing really, the trade deficit. She didn’t talk about child trafficking that she’s allowed to happen, because she’s the Border Czar and she’s presided over the weakest border.”
“She talks, but she doesn’t do. There’s no action.”
Harris’s speech concluded the 2024 Democratic National Convention. You can read The Washington Stand’s coverage of day one, day two, and day three.
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.