He chose Kamala Harris to carry this message. He’s Joe Biden. And the 81-year-old Democrat, vying for a second term, intends to hammer home between now and the election that a victory for Donald Trump would complete the dynamism of the right to abortion in the United States. “Access to abortion will be an important subject in states where it is not yet guaranteed,” believes Melissa DeRosa, a strategist close to the Democratic Party. But in states where people believe this right is already protected […], they will think more about economic issues, immigration, crime. »
“The worst nightmare a woman can experience”
The fact remains that several thousand people demonstrated in Washington on Friday, in the snow, chanting: “Abortion is killing. » And that the strategy of defending abortion had succeeded for Biden in the 2022 legislative elections. In fact, on Monday, the Vice-President of the United States will promise to defend access to voluntary termination of pregnancy in Wisconsin (north-east), one of the “swing states”, these undecided states which will play a key role in November. Then she will participate on Tuesday, with the president, in a meeting devoted to this theme, in Virginia, not far from Washington.
The Biden-Harris “ticket” campaign team, which is multiplying press releases on this theme, also launched a clip in which Austin Dennard, a mother from Texas (south), says she went through “the worst nightmare that can be live a woman.” This gynecologist explains that after learning that the child she was carrying was not viable, she was forced to terminate her pregnancy in another state, due to restrictions in force in Texas. Looking straight into the lens, she accuses: “It’s because of Donald Trump. »
Limited voluntary terminations of pregnancy
And more precisely because of the role played by the former president in the end, decided in June 2022 by the Supreme Court, of the “Roe v. Wade.” The Supreme Court, which became very conservative following the appointments made by Donald Trump, ruled that the right to abortion was not guaranteed by the Constitution, and that the American states were therefore competent in the matter. Since then, around twenty of them, mostly in the southern United States, have banned or very severely limited voluntary terminations of pregnancies.
The Democrats have since threatened, if the 77-year-old tycoon is elected, a ban on abortion throughout the country. And although abortion may be a historic political fault line in the United States, polls show that a majority of Americans are today in favor of a right to abortion. This also allowed Joe Biden to clearly limit the damage during the mid-term legislative elections in fall 2022, where analysts predicted a Republican surge. Supporters of the right to abortion subsequently won resounding victories at the local level.
A test of Kamala Harris’ electoral firepower
Joe Biden wants to believe that during the presidential election, the power of mobilization will remain strong. This offensive will also be a test of the electoral strike force of Kamala Harris, the first woman and first African-American in her post, who has been plowing the ground for several weeks, and with whom the American press has so far not been kind. .
The 59-year-old Democrat, whom the Republican opposition crushes at the slightest opportunity, recently received a rare, and undoubtedly unintentional, compliment from a Fox News channel columnist. “What Kamala is doing (in terms of campaigning on abortion rights) has a powerful impact on young women,” commented a former spokesperson for Donald Trump, Kayleigh McEnany, on the conservatives’ favorite channel.