Abortion remains a touchstone issue in the presidential race

ATLANTA — Early in their 90-minute debate Tuesday, former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris spent about 10 minutes discussing access to abortion, a topic Democrats hope will boost their chances in November.

Harris has spent much of her campaign tying Trump to the abortion bans that have taken effect across the country since the conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court, including three Trump appointed, ruled two years ago to overturn the constitutional guarantee to the procedure set by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

The Harris campaign also recently kicked off a bus tour of battleground states with 50 stops, including three in Georgia last week, focused specifically on abortion access.

Trump on Tuesday said he was proud that the Supreme Court had the “courage” to send the responsibility of regulating abortion back to the states, falsely claiming that most Americans wanted Roe v. Wade to be overturned. A 2022 poll by PRRI — a nonprofit organization that studies religion, culture and politics — found that 63% of Americans opposed overturning the decision.

“This is an issue that’s torn our country apart for 52 years,” Trump said. “Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative — they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote, and that’s what happened. Each individual state is voting. It’s the vote of the people now. It’s not tied up in the federal government.”

Harris said the 2022 Supreme Court decision allowed conservative states to implement strict abortion bans, such as the one in Georgia. Georgia law bans most abortions when a doctor can detect fetal cardiac activity, typically about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many know they are pregnant. It took effect about one month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

Harris said some of those bans do not include exceptions for rape or incest. Georgia’s law does include exceptions in such cases, but several states, including neighboring Alabama and Tennessee, don’t.

“Now in over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care,” Harris said. “In one state, it provides prison for life — Trump abortion bans that make no exception, even for rape and incest. Understand what that means: A survivor of a crime of violation to their body does not have the right to make a decision about what happens to their body next. That is immoral.”

A Harris campaign official said that 71% of grassroots donors who gave money during the first hour of Tuesday’s debate were women. Harris’ campaign is hoping its bus tour will help galvanize women around the issue of abortion rights to drive them to the polls in November.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign, restated the former president’s assertions that he would not sign a federal abortion ban, calling Harris’ stance on the procedure “radically out of touch.”

“President Trump also supports universal access to contraception and (in vitro fertilization),” Leavitt said.

Leavitt said Harris supports abortion up until birth paid by taxpayers. Harris has said she supports the same protections that there were under Roe v. Wade, which allowed abortions up until the point a fetus could survive on its own, which is typically at about 24 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases where the life of the mother is at risk.

The Harris bus tour is bringing various campaign surrogates — politicians and celebrities — as well as women who have been affected by bans across the country.

For example, the Alabama Supreme Court earlier this year ruled that embryos created for in vitro fertilization, a process used by families struggling with infertility, should be considered children and any harm to the embryos could be a criminal offense. The Alabama Legislature later enacted a law that extends legal protections to fertility clinics if embryos are harmed.

Latorya Beasley, a 38-year-old Alabama woman, said she was sitting in her fertility doctor’s waiting room when her state’s Supreme Court ruling came down. Doctors were two weeks away from transferring the embryo she made with her husband when Beasley was told she wouldn’t be able to go through with the procedure.

“Because of the delay, I did have some complications and ended up having to have some procedures done,” she told a reporter last week during the Harris bus tour between Macon and Atlanta. “It took a couple of months before I was able to actually restart and transfer. But I have transferred now, and the baby is on board.”

She and her husband used IVF to conceive their first child. This child will be her second.

Beasley was thrust into being one of the advocates for IVF, since news crews showed up at her fertility clinic the day Alabama’s Supreme Court issued its ruling. Since then, she’s spoken with her legislators and traveled to several Southern states to share her story.

“If you look at the first interview I did, I was literally in tears,” she said. “From there, there have been no more tears. Mama Bear was ignited. I was like: ‘Nope. I’m not going down like this. I’m going to fight.’ ”

U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, who served in the state Senate when Georgia was debating its law in 2019, said during last week’s bus tour that the government shouldn’t be involved in conversations about “personal, private medical decisions.”

“When the six-week abortion ban was going through the state Legislature, these are all of the unintended consequences that we warned them about,” said Williams, who is also the chair of the Georgia Democratic Party. “They ignored the people of Georgia who told them exactly what could happen.”