Vice President Kamala Harris condemned former US President Donald Trump for taking pride and credit for the reversal of Roe v Wade, according to an exclusive CNN interview published on Monday.
“The previous president expressed his intentions quite clearly. And fast forward to just recently, says he’s proud of what he did,” Harris told CNN journalist Laura Coates in Wisconsin.
“By inference, he is proud that women have been deprived of fundamental freedoms to make decisions about their own body; by inference, proud that doctors are being penalised and criminalised for providing health care, proud that women are silently suffering because they don’t have access to the health care they need,” Harris said. “So, let’s understand that the stakes are so very high.”
Her remarks came after Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential primary front-runner, called his role in the overturning Roe v Wade “a miracle” at a Fox News town hall in Des Moines, Iowa, on January 11. Trump nominated three of the Supreme Court Justices responsible for the decision.
“For 54 years, they were trying to get Roe v Wade terminated, and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it,” the former president said. (Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022, 49 years after the 1973 decision.) “Nobody else was going to get that done but me, and we did it, and we did something that was a miracle.”
He previously called his role in the reversal his “great honour,” according to CNBC.
Within a year of the historic Supreme Court ruling’s reversal, at least 15 states cut off all or most abortion services, and 13 states had near-total or total bans on the procedure, according to ABC News. Roughly 64% of OB-GYNs believe that the reversal has led to an uptick in maternal deaths and 70% believe it’s worsened racial inequities, according to a 2023 poll by ABC News.
Harris’ renewed focus on abortion rights come as part of her campaign strategy with Biden for the Oval Office, which is set to ramp up this week, to put a special spotlight on abortion as a counter to the anti-choice sentiments of Republican candidates, CNN reported.
“As Trump proudly brags he was the one who got rid of Roe v Wade, paving the way for Republican extremists across the country to pass draconian bans that are hurting women and threatening doctors … one-in-three women of reproductive age now live under an abortion ban,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez told reporters Wednesday, according to CBS.