Abortion and racism have one thing in common – Democrats need these two issues to persist forever into the future as they are the main rallying cries for their party. To solve or eliminate these “problems” would leave the party bereft of the two main topics they have used to solidify their voter base for the last 50+ years.
As a result, we don’t believe Kamala Harris would ever get the opportunity to sign a law legalizing abortion at the federal level. A Democrat controlled House and Senate would never pass such a bill. Not only is abortion far more valuable to Democrats as an active issue, the unspoken reality is that a bill protecting abortion nationwide is simply not worth the legislative time and effort relative to other progressive priorities.
If you doubt this, just look at what happened in all four Democrat Administrations since the Roe vs. Wade decision. Jimmy Carter had Democrat majorities in both the House and Senate during all four years of his Administration (including a super-majority in both houses the first two years). No abortion bill was passed. Bill Clinton had a Democrat majority in both the House and Senate during his first two years (including a super-majority in the house). No abortion bill was passed. Barack Obama had a Democrat majority in both the House and Senate during his first two years. No abortion bill was passed (Obamacare was a higher priority). Joe Biden and Kamala Harris had Democrat control of both the House and Senate in their first two years in office. No abortion bill was passed (an infrastructure bill was deemed a higher priority).
Still, Kamala Harris was quite passionate in her defense of abortion in her acceptance speech at the Democrat convention. But that was all it was – passion – without any substantive content. To start with, she was lobbying for a right that already exists for much of her voter base. For example, everyone in Harris’s home state of California has unimpeded access to abortion. California already has “shield” laws providing legal protection for abortion providers, which Harris argued was lacking across the country during her speech. The fact is that 16 “blue” states have laws right now that guarantee abortion freedoms similar to or greater than what exists in California.
So, who exactly was Harris speaking to when she said she would push hard for abortion freedom? The states with restrictive abortion laws generally have very conservative populations who either voted directly to have those restrictions or voted for representatives in their state legislature to do it for them. These people certainly have no use for Harris’s abortion freedom. While there are women who may want an abortion but happen to live in a conservative state with restrictions, they have the option of going to a less restrictive state to get the procedure. Will a Democrat Congress really want to spend all their political capital on what amounts to a “convenience” (not having to travel out of an abortion restrictive state to get the procedure) for a relatively small number of people?
In her speech, Harris also held Trump responsible for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. This demonstrated a complete ignorance (or a calculated misrepresentation) of what actually transpired both politically and legally to get us where we are today. Yes, it is true that Trump nominated three originalist justices for the Supreme Court. But that would’ve happened no matter which Republican got elected President in 2016. In the 2016 Republican primary, Trump’s main challengers were, Gingrich, Bush, Cruz, Kasic, Rubio, Christie and Ben Carson. Would any of these people have nominated liberal-leaning pro-abortion justices? Of course not. They would’ve nominated the same kind of justices, if not the same exact justices, that Trump did. Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barret got on to the court because the people elected a Republican President in 2016.
Lastly, Harris, and most Democrats for that matter, intentionally use the term Roe vs. Wade to refer to something entirely different from what it actually is. Roe vs. Wade is not a federally passed law. In the 237 years since our country’s founding, no US Congress has ever passed a law permitting or restricting abortion nationwide, and no president has ever signed such a law. Roe vs. Wade was a court case in the state of Texas in 1971 between a private citizen named Norma McCorvey (a.k.a. Jane Roe) and the District Attorney of Dallas County, Henry Wade. McCorvey challenged the constitutionality of the existing Texas abortion law. That state law had been in effect for 117 years and very simply stated that no abortions were allowed in the state except when necessary to save the life of the mother. After several years of legal proceedings, the case wound up before the Supreme court. In January of 1973, the high court issued a decision siding with McCorvey.
However, the court did not simply rule that the Texas abortion law was unconstitutional. Rather, they went much further and “created” a new law of their own making. They introduced the term “trimester” into popular culture and assigned varying degrees of “freedom” to have an abortion based on a pregnancy timetable that the justices themselves created out of thin air.1
Writing law is the sole province of the Legislative branch of our government as is clearly stated in the Constitution. The Judicial branch interprets those laws, it does NOT create laws of its own. But this is exactly what the 1973 court erroneously did in the Roe vs. Wade case. It was the principal reason why the outcome was subject to heavy legal criticism for the next 50 years.
Harris further proclaims that the 2022 case of Dobbs vs. Jackson Woman’s Health made abortions illegal. This is patently untrue. The Dobbs decision did not restrict or permit abortions. The only thing the Dobbs decision did was nullify the unconstitutional action taken by the 1973 Court to create a new abortion law of their own. Unless and until there is a federal abortion law passed by Congress and signed by the President, abortion laws passed in the individual states will now prevail just as they did for all of U.S. history prior to 1973.
None of the above bears in any way upon the moral question of abortion. That is a wholly different argument. Kamala Harris fares no better on that front either. She regurgitates the oft used legal premise that abortion is included in a woman’s right to the privacy of her body as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. While we and many others disagree with this interpretation of the 14th Amendment, particularly when taken in the context of when it was written (just after the Civil War), we will stipulate to her position here for the sake of argument.
How can this right of bodily privacy be valid as regards abortion, but not valid when it comes to COVID vaccines? In 2021, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris mandated by executive order that all federal workers were to have a COVID vaccine injected into their bodies even if they didn’t want it. All who resisted were told they would lose their job. You can’t claim to champion a right to bodily privacy in one case and then wantonly invade that same bodily privacy in another.
In sum, while Harris’s passion may be genuine on this topic, it is embarrassingly misplaced. It is also laced with dishonesty and factual inaccuracy that isn’t that hard to uncover. If only she would apply that same passion to a genuine problem like the southern border.
1 In 1992, the entire trimester pregnancy timetable in the Roe vs. Wade ruling, which laid out the framework for when in a pregnancy abortion could be restricted by the states, was completely thrown out in a court case titled Casey vs. Planned Parenthood. That 1992 case replaced the hard timetable of the trimester framework in Roe with the moving target of fetal viability. While the general notion of freedom to have an abortion up to a certain point in a pregnancy carried forward from Roe, from 1992 onward the new precedent for determining when in the pregnancy that freedom ended was defined by Casey.