Abortion And The US General Election
Abortion is a critical, if not the most important, issue for many voters – especially women, according to polls – ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November.
Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August 2024, she has been vocal about her support for abortion rights. Specifically, she supports Congress passing a federal law that would protect abortion rights in the wake of the Supreme Court in 2022 overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling, which recognized a constitutional right to abortion.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, meanwhile, has boasted about nominating three Supreme Court justices who were among the court majority that voted in 2022 to abandon a constitutional right to abortion. However, in September 2024, Trump said he would not sign a federal abortion ban, reversing course from his previous statements. He also did not answer a question during the September presidential debate about whether he would veto legislation that bans abortion.
Harris and Trump have starkly different track records on abortion. Let’s consider the broad strokes of each candidate’s past positions on, and actions regarding abortion.
HARRIS’ ABORTION RECORD
As attorney general, Harris’ first foray into the highly charged national abortion debate came in April 2016 when investigators from the California Department of Justice raided the home of anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, seizing a laptop and hard drives.
Nine months prior, Daleiden posted videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood executives engaging in the illegal sale of fetal remains. The videos showed covertly filmed conversations of Planned Parenthood executives discussing abortion procedures and how tissue is collected and exchanged with research companies.
The evidence gathered by Harris’ justice department laid the groundwork for 15 felony charges later filed by then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra against Daleiden and his counterpart Sandra Merritt, alleging they recorded conversations without consent in violation of state law.
As California’s attorney general, Harris co-sponsored the Reproductive FACT Act, which, among other requirements, mandated that crisis pregnancy centers inform patients that they are not licensed medical facilities and that abortion services are available elsewhere.
Anti-abortion groups sued to block the law once it went into effect. In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law on First Amendment grounds.
As a U.S. senator, Harris opposed anti-abortion bills that would have conferred personhood rights on fetuses. None of them ultimately passed.
Harris also championed various bills that would have protected and advanced reproductive rights. In 2019, for example, Harris was a co-sponsor of the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have enacted a federal statutory right to abortion. It also did not pass.
Finally, during Harris’ tenure as vice president, the Biden administration has used its executive power to ease barriers to abortion access, primarily through federal agency actions. The Food and Drug Administration, for example, removed a rule in 2021 that prohibited mailing medication abortion.
The Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance affirming that federal law requires emergency rooms to perform an abortion when it is medically necessary to stabilize a patient needing urgent care.
The Biden-Harris administration also supported federal legislation that includes accommodations for abortion. The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, enacted in 2023, requires employers to provide time off for a worker’s miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion.
Although the Biden-Harris administration’s abortion policy is not necessarily based on just the vice president, Harris, since Roe’s reversal, has been at the helm of the administration’s “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, speaking nationally in support of a right to abortion. Harris has also stressed the damage done in 14 states, in particular, where abortion is banned throughout pregnancy or after six weeks of gestation. She is also the first sitting Vice President or President in known history to visit an abortion clinic.
TRUMP’S ABORTION RECORD
Throughout this campaign, Trump has shifted his stance on abortion. He now says abortion should be a states’ rights issue and rejects Republican calls to endorse a national abortion ban, after previously urging some level of restriction at the federal level in his tenure as president.
He declared that under his administration, the government or company insurance would be mandated to pay for all costs associated with in vitro fertilization or IVF. He did not give specifics on how the plan would work or be funded.
During Trump’s tenure as president, he supported various changes – in the form of judicial appointments, federal funding and agency actions, some led by anti-abortion federal employees – in the service of making it harder for people to gain access to abortion care.
Trump began his presidency in 2016 by promising to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. He nominated three justices – Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – who joined the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, reversing Roe in June 2022.
The Senate confirmed 226 judges whom Trump nominated to the lower levels of federal courts. Trump’s nominations followed a campaign pledge in 2016 that he “would appoint pro-life judges.” Some were on record as being against abortion, and some believed that embryos should be treated like children.
From the start, Trump’s administration prioritized defunding Planned Parenthood clinics, which offers abortion and receive federal funding under the federal Title X programme for other family planning services. Trump signed a bill in 2017 to allow states to strip funding from Planned Parenthood clinics and other organizations that offer abortion, even though abortion care was not supported by the Title X funding.
The Trump administration unsuccessfully tried to replace the Affordable Care Act and undermine its coverage for contraceptives as well as its neutral stance on insurance coverage for abortion. Trump supported bills such as the never-passed American Health Care Act to limit abortion coverage in private health insurance plans.
Trump also appointed several people with anti-abortion positions to his administration, including Charmaine Yoest, the former CEO for the anti-abortion group Americans United for Life, who served as a top communications official at the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Trump administration advanced numerous other anti-abortion policies. For instance, the Department of Human and Health Services’ 2017 strategic plan defined life as beginning at conception – a decision that supported funding for crisis pregnancy centers and abstinence-only education programmes.
Finally, the Trump administration adopted an anti-abortion approach when it came to foreign policy. Trump reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, also known as the Global Gag Rule, which prohibits foreign nongovernmental organizations that receive U.S. funding from performing abortions or referring patients for abortion care elsewhere. Under the Mexico City Policy, Trump in 2017 removed US$8.8 billion in U.S. foreign aid for overseas programmes that provide or refer for abortions.
In 2017, Trump also suspended U.S. funding to the United Nations Population Fund, an agency focused on family planning for low-income people around the world, among other issues, which does “not promote abortion” but “supports the right of all women to get post-abortion care.” Biden restored funding to the U.N. agency in 2021.