Washington — Democrats are using their opposition to abortion restrictions to help reelect President Joe Biden. Vice President Kamala Harris will tour a Minnesota abortion facility on Thursday. Harris' office said it will be the first time a president or vice president visits a reproductive health center.
Her visit to Minneapolis-St. Paul is part of a statewide tour she launched in January to highlight the repercussions after the conservative Supreme Court majority overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. The judgment allowed Republican-led states to curtail or ban the surgery.
Harris, the first female vice president, has been the Democratic administration's harshest critic of the court's decision, contending that the government has no power to regulate a woman's body. Biden has promised to reinstate Roe safeguards, but he prefers to talk about “right to choose” rather than “abortion
Since the high court overturned abortion rights nearly two years ago, the issue has driven voters and boosted Democrats. The problem could affect the presidential and congressional elections this year. The vice president planned to visit a Minnesota health center during business hours. Her staff declined to identify the institution before she arrived for security reasons. The center offers abortion, birth control, and wellness.
Harris planned to tour the facility, talk to workers, and learn how abortion laws in other states have affected Minnesota. Her office says she will discuss Biden administration reproductive rights protections. Minnesota has no limits on abortion at any stage. Biden defeated Republican President Donald Trump by 7 percentage points in 2020 from the state.
Biden and Trump have earned enough delegates to be their parties' likely presidential nominees, setting up a November rematch. Biden and his Democratic allies have highlighted Trump's claim that he ended Roe. Trump appointed three conservative justices to the supreme court, which in 2022 ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization to eliminate a woman's constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.
Since then, election victories in 2022 and 2023 on abortion access have buoyed Democrats. In his State of the Union address last week, Biden promised “we’ll win again in 2024.”
In his speech, he promised to restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the nation if voters “send me a Congress that supports the right to choose.” In January 2023, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed a bill to guarantee the right to abortion and other reproductive health care regardless of future judges.
Democrats used their new control of both houses to get the law through in the first month of the 2023 legislative session. They attributed their state Senate takeover and House majority retention to the backlash against the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision in a year when Republicans predicted advances.
More than a dozen states, including Minnesota neighbors North Dakota and South Dakota, ban abortion. Iowa and Wisconsin restrict it. Due of restrictions elsewhere, abortions have increased in Minnesota.
Stay turned for development