Vice President Kamala Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic on Thursday, marking what her office said was the first time a U.S. president or vice president has toured a facility that performs abortions, as the White House steps up its defense of reproductive rights in this year's election.
“Right now, in our country, we are facing a very serious health crisis,” Harris said at the St. Paul facility. “The crisis is affecting many people in our country, and most of them, frankly, are suffering in silence.”
Although Democratic leaders in Minnesota have protected access to abortion, neighboring states have banned or severely restricted the procedure.
“How dare these elected leaders think they are in a better position to tell women what they need,” Harris said. “We have to be a nation that trusts women.”
Harris said she met two dozen health care workers at the clinic who created an environment where patients could be “safe” and “free from judgment.”
Dr. Sarah Traxler, chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood North Central, introduced herself as a “proud abortion provider” and called Harris' visit a “historic moment.” She said the number of patients visiting the clinic from out of state has doubled.
“Everyone should have the right to access health care,” Traxler said.
Demonstrators gathered in the street, holding banners reading, “Life is a human right” and “Abortion kills a human being.”
The White House has few options to protect abortion access after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade two years ago, paving the way for Republican-led states to enact restrictions or bans on the procedure. But the visit reflected Democrats' intensified focus on reproductive rights to mobilize their voters to re-elect President Biden in a potential rematch with Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee.
Harris, the first woman elected vice president, led the White House outreach and her trip to Minneapolis-St. Poole is part of a national tour that began in January.
Her decision to make a historic visit to a clinic, which also provides contraception and preventative health care, demonstrated her more aggressive approach to the issue than Biden. While Biden has pledged to restore Roe v. Wade protections if Democrats regain full control of Congress, he tends to talk about “the right to choose” rather than saying “abortion.”
After the clinic visit, Harris was scheduled to speak at a Biden-Harris campaign event in St. Paul designed specifically for women.
There are no restrictions on abortion at any stage of pregnancy in Minnesota. Biden won the state by 7 percentage points in 2020 on his way to defeating then-President Trump.
Both Biden and Trump won enough delegates to be considered their parties' presumptive nominees for president, setting up a rematch in November.
Biden and his Democratic delegates highlighted Trump's comments in which the former president took credit for presiding over the end of Roe. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the Supreme Court, tipping its ideological balance in favor of striking down a woman's constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy with her 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Women's Health Jackson.
Since then, Democrats have been emboldened by election victories in 2022 and 2023, both of which were open to abortion. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden pledged that “we will win again in 2024.”
He also said in his speech that if voters send me a pro-choice Congress, I promise I will restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land again.
In Minnesota, Gov. Tim Walz enshrined the right to abortion and other reproductive health care into state law in January 2023 when he signed a bill aimed at ensuring the state's current protections remain in place regardless of who sits on the courts. future.
Democratic leaders took advantage of their new control of both chambers of the Legislature to fast-track the bill into the first month of the 2023 legislative session. They credited the backlash against the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade to their control of the state Senate and their majority in the House of Representatives in A year where Republicans expected to make gains.
Abortion is currently illegal in more than a dozen states, including Minnesota's neighbors North Dakota and South Dakota, and it is banned in neighboring Iowa and Wisconsin. Minnesota has seen a spike in the number of patients coming to the state for abortions due to restrictions imposed elsewhere.
Superville writes for the Associated Press.
