As long as I’ve been attending Democratic National Conventions—and that timeline extends way back to 1980—I’ve been struck by the huge number of delegates carrying signs defending abortion rights. At the 1992 convention at Madison Square Garden in New York City, for example, a veritable sea of blue and white “Keep Abortion Legal” signs confronted me everywhere I moved in the convention hall. While abortion does not rate as a top concern of voters in national polls (especially compared to the economy or immigration) it is a key issue, and an extremely motivating one, for the Democratic base. Voicing support for abortion rights has helped Democrats rack up big wins since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.
Abortion is also the issue where there is a stark contrast between Vice-President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden. Though he became an abortion rights supporter, Biden has always seemed uncomfortable discussing the issue and somewhat ambivalent in his support. By contrast, Harris has been the Biden administration’s loudest and most fulsome advocate for abortion rights, and her speeches about the issue are among her strongest. When she was in the Senate, her tough questioning of conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh included this much-quoted, 19-word, devastating line: “Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” Kavanaugh weakly responded, “I am not thinking of any right now.”
A strong majority of Americans supports abortion in most cases and opposes a federal ban on the procedure. Donald Trump, over the years, has waffled on the issue and now says he would leave decisions about the legality of abortion to the states. Following the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs decision, which repealed the federal right to an abortion, many states have passed legal restrictions—some as draconian as outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Biden and Harris have both vowed to try to enact federal legislation protecting abortion rights, but Congress is unlikely to take this up anytime soon.
Another constituency that Harris could win over with her support for abortion rights is independent women, including female voters who have voted Republican in past elections. There is a wide gender gap in the American electorate, with women generally preferring Democratic candidates, who have more progressive positions on social issues such as abortion, while white men are more likely to support Republicans.
Trump’s history of abusing women, including the guilty verdicts in the case involving porn star Stormy Daniels and the finding in a civil lawsuit that he sexually abused the writer E Jean Carroll, is one of his most serious weaknesses as a presidential candidate. Meanwhile, his choice of Ohio senator JD Vance as a running mate has made matters even worse—especially because of Vance’s past comments deriding Harris for being a “childless cat lady” and insulting childless women in America as “miserable” people who were not fulfilling their biological mission. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal laced into Vance for making “the sort of smart-aleck crack that gets laughs in certain right-wing male precincts” but that “doesn’t play well with the millions of female voters, many of them Republican, who will decide the presidential race.”
Women comics and columnists have had a field day with Vance’s “cat lady” remark. In the New York Times, Maureen Dowd headlined her Sunday column, “JD Vance, Purr-fectly Dreadful” and eviscerated Vance’s view that childless women are un-American. “Unless women are fulfilling their duties as breeders and helpmates, they’re not fully Americans?” she asked, incredulously, “It’s an un-American stance that’s beneath contempt.”
“As a cat-loving, cosmopolitan type myself,” Dowd concluded, “I do not want Trump and Vance making intimate decisions for American women or judging us or disparaging us for our lives — all nine of them.”
Vance, who has supported a federal ban on abortions, has tailored his current position—that states should decide abortion law—to be in harmony with Trump’s.
Whatever efforts they make to backpedal on abortion, Republicans still cannot get away from the fact that as president, Trump added three conservative, anti-abortion justices to the US Supreme Court, which provided the majority in the Dobbs decision that took away federal protection for a woman’s right to choose. Since the 2022 decision, Democrats have won just about every election where abortion has been on the ballot.
If she wants a blueprint for how to win on the abortion issue, Harris need only look to Nevada, where two years ago Senator Catherine Cortez Masto won re-election in a tough race where her pro-abortion rights stand is credited with her narrow win. In a 2023 interview, Cortez Masto said, “After talking to so many Nevadans, they were outraged by just the overturning of Roe v Wade,” adding that voters were “outraged that the court and right-wing elected officials thought it was okay to restrict women’s access to not just abortion, but to essential health care and reproductive freedom.”
With the legality of medically induced abortion and the drugs used to terminate pregnancies hanging in the balance, abortion will remain front and centre in the 2024 presidential election.
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Harris is certain to highlight abortion rights when she makes her speech accepting the nomination. She was able to cement the number of delegates she needs to sit atop the Democratic ticket with the help of virtually every major women’s political organisation that supports abortion rights. And millions of dollars of new political donations have flowed to Harris from women supporters of abortion rights.
Harris is a known and trusted fighter for women, and her unambiguous support for abortion rights gives her a clear advantage in attracting their votes. A review of her recent speeches shows her considerable skill in exploiting the abortion issue, especially when she frames it as being part of a broader, right-wing attack on women.
Appearing before a meeting of black sororities in Indianapolis, Harris ripped apart Project 2025, the issues agenda prepared for Trump by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which, among other things, calls for a federal ban on abortion.
“Let’s be clear: this represents an outright attack on our children, our families and our future,” Harris said. “These extremists will take us back. But we aren’t going back.” She also embraced, “the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body.”
The November election could boil down to the simple reality that the Democratic Party is the Mommy Party, while the Republicans are the Daddy Party. Women are registered to vote in the US at higher rates than men. In recent years, the number of women registered to vote in the US has typically been about 10 million more than the number of men registered to vote. As the first black woman to be nominated by the Democratic Party, Harris will be hoping that a widening gender gap, stoked by a backlash against Republican-supported abortion restrictions, will help vault her into the White House.
