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topicnews · October 9, 2024

Where do Trump and Harris stand? • Ohio Capital Journal

Where do Trump and Harris stand? • Ohio Capital Journal

WASHINGTON – This year’s election marks the first time voters will cast their ballot for president since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the constitutional right to abortion and made reproductive rights a key issue for many voters.

Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump have spoken several times in recent months about reproductive rights and abortion access.

Trump’s stance has evolved during his bid for the White House. He now claims he won’t sign a law implementing statewide abortion restrictions and wants regulation left to the states.

Harris has consistently maintained that a nationwide law guaranteeing access would ensure that the choice is left to women, not politicians.

“I promise you that as President of the United States, if Congress passes a bill to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade, “I will be proud to sign it into law,” Harris said during the presidential debate in September.

Trump patted himself on the back during the same debate for nominating three justices to the Supreme Court who later ruled with their conservative colleagues that the Constitution did not provide the privacy rights that two previous Supreme Court rulings said they did affected women’s decisions about abortion.

“I did something that no one thought possible,” Trump said of nominating the three justices. “The states are voting now. What she says is an absolute lie. And as far as the abortion ban is concerned: No, I am not in favor of a ban on abortion. But that doesn’t matter because this issue has now been taken over by the states.”

Harris had just said that Trump would sign a nationwide abortion ban if elected, citing Project 2025, the blueprint for a second Trump administration released by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. Trump and his campaign have repeatedly tried to distance themselves from the document and many of its proposals.

Many politicians falsely portrayed the Supreme Court ruling two years ago as sending abortion regulation back to the states. What the conservative justices wrote was that ending Roe v. Wade means that “the authority to regulate abortion will be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

Of course, this also includes Congress and the President.

Trump’s position varies

Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Trump’s stance on abortion has not always been linear or consistent. He told Republicans earlier this year that they should avoid discussing the issue to win elections while courting organizations that see it as a path to outright abolition of abortion.

Trump ran afoul of several anti-abortion organizations and conservative Republicans in April when he announced he did not want Congress to take action on a nationwide law.

Trump had previously said he would support a 16-week nationwide ban. In his April announcement, he reiterated that he supports exceptions to state abortion bans in cases of rape, incest and the life of the pregnant patient.

Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, released a statement after Trump’s announcement in April saying she was “deeply disappointed.”

“To say the issue is ‘back to the states’ is to leave the national debate to Democrats who are working tirelessly to pass laws requiring abortion during all nine months of pregnancy,” Dannenfelser wrote. “If they succeed, they will eliminate states’ rights.”

About a month later, in May, Trump, Dannenfelser, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina had a “great meeting,” a statement released later said.

Then, this summer, Trump muddied his stance on abortion even further when he spoke in June to an organization that called abortion the “greatest atrocity” facing the United States that should be “totally eradicated.”

“These will be your years because you will make a comeback like no other group,” Trump said at the Danbury Institute’s first Life & Liberty Forum. “I know what’s happening. I know where you come from and where you are going. And I will be with you side by side.”

Most recently, Trump posted on social media during the vice presidential debate in early October that he would veto any nationwide abortion restrictions.

Trump wrote in all caps that he would “under no circumstances support and would even veto a federal abortion ban because it is up to states to decide based on the will of their voters (the will of the people!).” “

Trump added that he does not support access to abortions in the seventh, eighth or ninth month of pregnancy, nor does he support the killing of babies, which is already illegal.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data analyzed by Pew Research Center, about 93% of abortions in 2021 occurred within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy.

According to the data, another 6% of abortions occurred between 14 and 20 weeks of pregnancy, with the remaining 1% occurring after 21 weeks of pregnancy.

“Nearly half of the people who had an abortion after 20 weeks did not suspect they were pregnant until later in the pregnancy. Other barriers to care included a lack of information about where to obtain an abortion, transportation difficulties, lack of insurance coverage and inability to pay for the procedure,” according to a KFF Health analysis.

Harris position

Vice President and Democratic nominee for President Kamala Harris. (Photo by Jeff Swensen/Getty Images)

Harris has repeatedly criticized Trump for criticizing the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade celebrated ending it, saying during the presidential debate that government restrictions had harmed women in countless ways.

“Trump’s abortion bans make no exceptions even for rape and incest,” Harris said. “Understand what this means – a survivor of a crime, of an injury to their body, does not have the right to make a decision about what happens next to their body. This is immoral.

“And you don’t have to give up your faith or deeply held beliefs to agree with the government, and Donald Trump certainly shouldn’t tell a woman what to do with her body.”

Harris called on Democrats to eliminate the Senate’s legislative filibuster to make it easier to pass a bill that would restore nationwide abortion protections.

This Senate rule requires that at least 60 representatives vote to advance the legislation before the bill can be voted on by a simple majority. It’s different than the so-called talking filibuster, in which a senator or group of like-minded lawmakers talk on the floor for hours to delay a vote.

Democrats would have to maintain their majority in the Senate against all odds to actually pass an exception to the legislative filibuster and pass a bill to reinstate Roe v. Wade. Democrats would also have to regain control of the House of Representatives.

A divided Congress or a few Democrats opposing rule changes in the Senate would hamper Harris’ efforts to sign nationwide abortion protections.

Democrats tried to pass legislation through the Senate that would have provided nationwide abortion protections when they had unified control of the government in 2022, but were blocked by the filibuster.

Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins, Virginia Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, and Arizona Independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema later introduced a bipartisan bill that produced a similar result but it should not be voted on.

Legislation from two years ago would likely fail again if Democrats win the November election, unless they carve out an exception in the Senate filibuster.

Swing state voters

Harris and Trump’s stance on abortion access will likely play a role in which candidate wins the Electoral College in key swing states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Democrats are optimistic that questions about abortion access in 10 states will improve Harris’ chances through higher voter turnout and increased spending by reproductive rights organizations.

While many of the referendums are taking place in solid blue or red states, the proposals in Arizona and Florida could influence voter turnout and motivation.

Louis Jacobson, senior columnist for Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, wrote earlier this month that a key question on Election Day will be whether “abortion rights advocates will maintain their perfect 7-for-7 record since Roe v. Wade was knocked over.”

Voters will also decide numerous other ballot issues, including recreational cannabis, minimum wage increases and ranked-choice voting.

In a previous post about the abortion vote questions, Jacobson and Samantha Putterman wrote that “(e)very post-Roe measures were on the ballot during a relatively low-turnout election — either the November midterms, a primary, or a secondary election . “Annual election.”

“Any measure that comes to the ballot in 2024 will face voters in November of a presidential year, when voter turnout is far higher,” they wrote. “This may be damaging to abortion rights advocates as moderate and liberal voters have recently been flexing their electoral muscle more amid low turnout.”

Public opinion polls conducted by the Pew Research Center over the past three decades have consistently shown that support for keeping abortion legal outweighs support for making abortion illegal in most or all cases.

The 2024 poll found that 63% of people want abortion to be legal in most or all cases, while 36% believe it should be illegal in all or most cases.

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