In her first, and perhaps only, debate with former President Donald Trump in September, Kamala Harris spoke about abortion in terms not typically used by a Democratic presidential candidate. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering from a miscarriage, being denied care in an emergency room because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail, and she’s bleeding out in a car in the parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that,” Harris said, responding to Trump’s claim that Americans wanted the issue of abortion access to be returned to the states. “A 12- or 13-year-old survivor of incest being forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”
It was a reminder of why abortion rights activists were so excited when Harris became the Democratic nominee for president in August. Her campaign marks a shift in the party’s rhetoric on abortion access. Gone are the days of candidates who insisted that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” while barely daring to mention the actual word “abortion.”
But the 2022 decision by the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade brought abortion to the forefront of Democrats’ campaign messaging and was critical to Democratic victories in several state and congressional races. Practically overnight, abortion surged in importance as an issue for voters.
Harris’s campaign has centered the real, often shocking consequences of the repeal of Roe. Kaitlyn Joshua, a Louisiana woman who has become a key campaign surrogate for Harris, spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention in August, relating how she was turned away from two emergency rooms during her first-trimester miscarriage in 2022. She was flanked by Amanda Zurawski, who unsuccessfully sued the state of Texas after she was denied an abortion during a nonviable and life-threatening pregnancy, and Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky woman who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was 12 years old. Duvall, who miscarried the pregnancy, has also appeared in a campaign ad for Harris.
Harris is the most prominent Democratic politician to focus on these stories, but she is hardly alone. For more than two years, Democrats across the country have focused on the tangible consequences of the repeal of Roe, and warned of what a Trump presidency and Republican-controlled Congress could entail for abortion access. They believe that this messaging, and the impact of the repeal of Roe, could help them win the White House.
“I’ve had conversations with a lot of women—some that have not been engaged in the political conversation, and women who have, but that may have voted for the Republican candidate in the past—and this is an issue that completely changes things for them,” said former Representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, who is running in Florida against incumbent GOP Senator Rick Scott. “They need to understand … that if this is an important issue for them, that they have to vote for the candidate that will protect a woman’s right to choose at the federal level.”
These more extreme stories are increasingly common, but most abortion stories are less sensational.
The typical abortion recipient is not a married woman suffering a miscarriage in a wanted pregnancy, or a young girl who had been sexually abused—she is more likely a twentysomething, low-income, nonwhite single mother with at least one child at home. This woman might already face significant stigma because of her race, her income, and her status as a single mother, which would then be exacerbated by societal beliefs about people who seek abortions.
Harris’s campaign is betting that sharing the stories of women who experienced miscarriages or other health emergencies at a later point in their pregnancy may help shift the perception of people who seek abortions as irresponsible—and can appeal to voters, particularly moderate women, who have only recently begun voting for Democrats. Having the women themselves be the messengers also puts a human face to these stories, as well as helping certain voters understand that this scenario could happen to them, or their loved ones. Not all abortion advocates are thrilled about this approach.
“When we get into conversations about why and under what circumstances [abortions take place], we are undercutting why we should trust women,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, the president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund. “When we’re asking why they needed access to abortion, then we’re implicitly saying … ‘I need a little bit more information before I don’t pass judgment on you.’”
Abortion rights advocates have sought to frame the battle over abortion access as a conflict between freedom and extremism. Republicans, meanwhile, have countered by arguing that Democrats are the real extremists: They would not only allow abortion up until the moment of birth but even allow mothers to, as Donald Trump claimed at the September debate, “execute” newborns. These Republican talking points may be hyperbolic, but they reflect a desire to flip the narrative in a way that mirrors a regular polling result: that abortion after a certain point in pregnancy is unpopular with most Americans. Harris herself has not answered questions about whether she would support expanding abortion access beyond the limits of Roe, which only legalized the procedure through fetal viability at around 24 weeks.
According to Pew Research Center, 63 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Gallup has found that 60 percent of Americans believe that overturning Roe was a bad thing. However, 55 percent also believe it should be illegal in the second trimester, and 70 percent think it should be illegal in the third. Nevertheless, a poll by PerryUndem, a consulting firm that does regular surveys on abortion, found nearly 80 percent also believe that laws on abortion can’t account for every situation where one might be needed. Much of Harris’s messaging appears to be focused on those voters.
In September, a pro-Harris super PAC launched three ads targeting suburban and exurban white women in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, featuring health professionals concerned about the effects of abortion bans.
“When my pregnancy was in crisis, and the child I wanted and loved had a devastating diagnosis, we chose to have an abortion,” Anna, an ob-gyn, says in one ad, which was produced by the group American Bridge. “Women are nearly dying because of these Trump abortion bans. As an ob-gyn, I can’t tell you how dangerous this is. And as a mother who’s had a miscarriage, I can’t think about living in a world like that.”
“When it comes to voters who are on the fence, what we’ve seen time and time again is that this is an issue that reaches across parties, especially with this group of women voters,” said Eva Kemp, vice president of campaigns at American Bridge. “When we present them with storytellers who look, sound, and feel like their relatives, their neighbors, their friends—it’s even more compelling.”
Democrats may be elevating the stories of women with atypical abortion experiences because they are so shocking and increasingly frequent, said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has written several books on the history of abortion politics in the United States. Lawsuits such as the one brought by Zurawski against Texas and a similar case against Idaho for its restrictive abortion ban have ensured national attention. For Democrats to ignore these stories would be “political malpractice,” Ziegler said.
Senator Tina Smith, a Democrat who once served as the vice president of Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, said that these stories also provided distinct examples of the impact of restrictive abortion laws.
“There’s so much clarity about the impact of somebody taking that decision away from you. A person who decides to terminate their pregnancy in 10 or 12 weeks and isn’t able to because of these Trump abortion bans—the impact on their life is really severe, but it’s less visible,” said Smith. Still, she continued, “It’s incumbent upon those of us that are talking about this to not focus exclusively on these terrible, but unbelievably rare, circumstances that face people who don’t have access to care.”
Connecting abortion access to maternal health and motherhood “makes it easier for people to talk about the story,” said Monica Simpson of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive rights organization, “as opposed to the ways that we’ve been conditioned to think that people who have an abortion because they want one and they need one [have] done something wrong.” A story about someone who wanted, but was unable to obtain, an abortion is “just as tragic” as someone who wanted to give birth but experienced a miscarriage, Simpson continued.
This approach to messaging could show voters who may be less concerned with how an abortion ban affects low-income and nonwhite Americans that these policies could have an impact on their lives as well.
“I think that’s also a completely fair point, to say, ‘Even if you think that it’s OK to stigmatize these people, if you think that these criminal laws aren’t coming for you, too, you’re wrong,’” said Ziegler. “I think seeing or showing [people in] positions of privilege that they have more in common with people they may have been ignoring than they think is politically valuable. It’s just a question of whether it inadvertently reinforces some other kind of stigma.”
The fall of Roe has led to a greater openness about abortion in all its forms. Tresa Undem, a partner and co-founder of PerryUndem, said that a story about a woman wanting an abortion may be more palatable to voters in 2024 than it would have been even in 2020. During the debate with Trump, Harris gave the example of women suffering mis-carriages or who were victims of rape being unable to obtain abortion care—but she also talked about a woman who would have to travel to another state to get an abortion, calling that hypothetical “unconscionable.”
“Maybe three or four years ago, I might have said the story about unwanted pregnancy, or the story about rape or incest might have been way more impactful than a typical story,” said Undem. Whereas now, she continued, the example of a woman needing to travel across state lines is “pretty relatable as well to people.”
McGill Johnson also warned against the presumption that an upper-class suburban woman would not have experience with an unwanted pregnancy. “All of these stories resonate precisely because we all know, either through experience, or through friendships, through relationships, through our sistership, the variety of circumstances that people want or need to have an abortion,” she said.
And Harris has spoken about more average abortion experiences. She was quick to respond when ProPublica in September revealed that a woman named Amber Nicole Thurman had died after being unable to access abortion care in Georgia in 2022. She had experienced complications from medication abortion, but the hospital she visited afterward was unwilling to perform a procedure to clear the remaining fetal tissue from her uterus and later conducted a hysterectomy after acceding to the procedure. Thurman was 28 years old, Black, and a single mother already raising a son—representative of the average abortion patient. Thurman, according to her best friend, did not believe that it was the best time in her life to give birth to twins.
Thurman’s death quickly became a rallying cry for Democrats and abortion rights advocates; the organization Reproductive Freedom for All launched an ad highlighting Thurman’s experience, which targeted young and low-propensity voters in Georgia—those who might see themselves in Thurman’s story. Harris’s willingness to discuss Thurman’s experience indicates an openness to highlighting the experiences of all abortion patients; at a rally in Georgia in September, Harris led attendees in speaking Thurman’s full name as a way to remember her.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey in late September, Harris said that “Amber’s story highlights the fact that among everything that is wrong with these bans and what has happened in terms of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, it’s a health care crisis.”
Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams, also spoke during the interview with Winfrey. Her daughter shared characteristics with many abortion patients—and people who will be affected by abortion bans—but her individual story has universal weight.
“I want y’all to know Amber was not a statistic,” Williams said.
