Kamala Harris Did What Biden Could Never: Make the Debate About Abortion 

Following Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s first (and last) 2024 presidential debate in June, I wrote a story with the headline “Biden Flailed Through His No. 1 Issue: Abortion.” In response to Trump’s head-spinning lies about “abortion after birth” and a simple question about abortion, Biden rambled incoherently about immigration and his opposition to “later abortions.” There was no shortage of disastrous moments throughout Biden’s presidential bid-ending debate performance, but part of me believes his fundamental inability to speak about abortion—the defining issue of this election cycle, and his main prayer for reelection—was the nail in the coffin.

On Tuesday, Kamala Harris’ ability to make the debate about abortion proved exactly why she’s the nominee and, as Trump so brashly put it on stage that night, why Biden was in bed while they were debating. It certainly helped that, unlike CNN, ABC’s debate moderators objectively, candidly fact-checked Trump when he psychotically lied that abortion rights result in infanticide, aka “abortion after birth.” As Linsey Davis was forced to clarify, “There is no state where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.” Online right-wingers are bitching and crying about the great persecution that is Trump being fact-checked on a lie, but, ultimately, it was Harris and not the moderators who dominated Trump on the issue.

First, in response to Trump’s bizarre claim that the reversal of Roe v. Wade was bipartisan and universally supported, Harris, visibly aghast, responded, “You want to talk about this is what people wanted? Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because health care providers are afraid they might go to jail and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot?” She seems to be referring to the story of Jaci Statton, an Oklahoma woman suffering from a molar pregnancy that resulted in cancerous tissue, who was instructed to wait in a hospital parking for her condition to worsen before doctors could provide emergency abortion care.

Harris then asserted that “Trump abortion bans that make no exception even for rape and incest,” which 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.” Her answers cited the stories of people who have been forced to fly on planes and drive hours out-of-state carrying nonviable, sometimes life-threatening pregnancies, as well as the stories of child sexual abuse victims forced to carry rape-induced pregnancies. Of course, as Jezebel's Susan Rinkunas put it, any denied abortion could be considered immoral, "not just those denied to people who are survivors of crimes."

“If Donald Trump were to be reelected, he will sign a national abortion ban,” Harris asserted. In response to this, all Trump could do was waffle, throw JD Vance under the bus (“I didn’t talk about it with JD,” he said when asked about Vance’s previous claims Trump would veto a national abortion ban), and very conspicuously decline not once but twice to say he’d veto a national abortion ban. That, in itself, is terrifying—even more terrifying is that, as Project 2025 has outlined, Trump could circumvent Congress to ban abortion with the Comstock Act, a dormant 19th-century law that prohibits the dissemination of "obscene" materials.

By contrast, Harris stressed that if elected with a Democratic majority in Congress, she would sign legislation to restore a federal right to abortion. That’s… great and all, but the chances of a Democratic majority sizable enough to deliver such a bill are slim to none. So, in addition to fearmongering about Project 2025, I’d like to hear more about how Harris would similarly wield the presidency, with or without Congress, to expand reproductive rights.

Say what you will about Harris as the Democratic nominee—I certainly take issue with a good amount of her policies—but there’s no way a debate like this would be possible with Biden still at the top of the ticket. The president repeatedly says he doesn’t like abortion—citing his Catholic faith as if people of all faiths don’t support and have abortions—and, as his June debate performance demonstrated, he also has no idea how to talk about it. Meanwhile, Harris has led on the issue as vice president, traveling the country to learn about the impacts of state abortion bans; before that, in the Senate, she introduced legislation to address the Black maternal mortality crisis.

Abortion is a driving issue of this election cycle, up and down the ballot. It makes all the difference in the world that Democrats now have a nominee who realizes this.