Harris is campaigning in Texas to highlight the state’s abortion ban

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to reliably Republican Texas just 10 days before Election Day to refocus her campaign against the former president Donald Trump on reproductive medicine, which Democrats see as a crucial issue this year.

According to her campaign, Harris will visit Houston on Friday for an event with women affected by the state’s restrictive abortion laws following the repeal of Roe v. Wade passed by the Supreme Court in 2022. She will travel there after spending time in Georgia, another state with a restrictive law.

Since that 2022 Supreme Court decision, new abortion restrictions have been in place in most Republican-controlled states. including 14 that ban the procedure at any stage of pregnancy. Harris has argued that Trump – who nominated three conservative justices to the Supreme Court who later voted to overturn Roe v. Wade agreed – is responsible for the deterioration of medical care for women and that he would seek further restrictions.

Campaign officials viewed Harris’ plan to visit Texas as an unconventional way to capture the attention of voters in battleground states that are inundated with campaign ads and routine campaign events. The last non-theater visit Harris made was to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in early September to promote her small business tax plan. Since then she has traveled to the seven contested states.

“Texas is the stage for this event,” said David Plouffe, senior campaign adviser. “But for us, the people on the battlefields are the most important audience.”

Plouffe said the vice president was making the trip “to really tell a story about Donald Trump’s role in eliminating Roe v. “To tell Wade what that means for people in a state like Texas and what’s at stake — if you live in a state that doesn’t currently have one.” Abortion ban — that could be coming to you if Donald Trump wins.”

In 2016, Democrats, confident of their chances against Trump in his first run for the White House, sent their candidate, the former secretary of state Hillary Clinton They traveled to Texas, Iowa and Ohio hoping to score points in the Electoral College while missing signs of trouble in Democratic-leaning states that flipped and sent Trump to the Oval Office.

“We’re not doing that,” Plouffe said, dismissing the idea that the campaign is trying to compete in Texas. “We move away from the battlefields because we believe it will help us on the battlefields.”

He said it made “very strategic sense” to go somewhere like Texas, “where there are the most horrific and tragic stories about what’s happening, and then link that directly to the threat that voters in those states are without.” Current bans should be feared. “Donald Trump’s potential next term.”

Women affected by abortion bans have lobbied for Harris, including Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who went into premature labordeveloped sepsis and nearly died after doctors said they could not intervene to perform an abortion because Zurawski was not in sufficient medical danger to allow the procedure. Harris has it too highlighted the story of Amber Thurman, a Georgia mother who died after waiting 20 hours for a hospital to treat her complications from an abortion pill.

Harris will be joined on Friday by the Democratic congressman. Colin Allredwho is making a major attempt to unseat the Republican senator from Texas. Ted Cruz. She is also scheduled to record a podcast interview with the Texas author Brene Brown.

Trump has also tried to motivate his supporters with events outside the battlefields. He has a rally planned at Madison Square Garden in New York this weekend and one at the Coachella music festival site in California last week.

Texas embodies the post-Roe landscape. The strict ban on abortion prohibits doctors from performing abortions as soon as cardiac activity is detected, which can happen as early as six weeks or sooner. As a result, women, even those who had no intention of terminating a pregnancy, are increasingly suffering from poorer medical care, in part because doctors cannot intervene unless she is experiencing a life-threatening illness or “significant impairment of major bodily functions.” “to prevent.” The state has also become a battleground for litigation; The US Supreme Court got involved on the side of the state ban just two weeks agoA lower court’s decision stands.

Complaints that pregnant women in medical distress are being turned away from emergency rooms in Texas and elsewhere have increased as hospitals wrestle with whether standard care could violate strict state laws against abortion. Several Texas women have done it filed complaints against hospitals for not terminating their failed and dangerous pregnancies due to the government ban. In some cases, women lost reproductive organs.

Harris was asked in an interview with NBC News whether she would be willing to make concessions to secure congressional action to restore abortion rights if she were elected and had to work with a Republican-controlled Congress.

“I don’t think we should make concessions when we talk about the fundamental freedom to make decisions about one’s body,” she said.

Anti-abortion groups responded quickly. Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, released a statement saying, “So not only is she pro-abortion, she is also anti-religious freedom.” Duly noted.”

Trump has constantly postponed his points of view and gave vague and contradictory answers to questions about an issue that has become a problem a major weakness for the Republicans in this year’s election. He recently said he would do it vote against a constitutional amendment on the ballot in Florida that aims to repeal the state’s six-week abortion ban.

Um 6 out of 10 Americans believe their state should generally allow a person to have a legal abortion if they do not want to become pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

voters in seven statesincluding some conservatives, have either protected abortion rights or rejected attempts to restrict them in statewide votes over the past two years.

In his first year as president, Trump said he was “pro-life with exceptions” but also said “there needs to be some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions – a position he quickly reversed.

At the annual “March for Life” in 2018, Trump spoke out in favor of a nationwide ban on abortion from the 20th week of pregnancy. In MarchTrump indicated he might support a nationwide abortion ban for about 15 weeks, before announcing he would instead leave the matter to the states.