The strategy was successful in the 2022 legislative elections, will it be the same in the presidential election? Joe Biden intends to hammer home between now and the election that a victory for Donald Trump would completely dynamite the right to abortion in the United States.
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“The vice-president and I are fighting to protect women’s freedom of choice in the face of the dangerous, extreme and disconnected projects of Republicans,” said the 81-year-old Democrat in a press release published Monday, the anniversary of the famous jurisprudence. Roe v. Wade” on voluntary terminations of pregnancy.
Kamala Harris, the president’s running mate for the November presidential election, begins a national tour on Monday dedicated to defending the right to abortion.
First stop: Wisconsin (northeast), one of the “swing states”, these undecided states which will play a key role in November.
Tuesday, she will join Joe Biden for a meeting on the same theme, in Virginia, not far from Washington.
The Democratic campaign team is simultaneously releasing multiple press releases and a clip in which Austin Dennard, a mother from Texas (south), recounts “the worst nightmare a woman can experience”.
This gynecologist explains that after learning that the child she was carrying was not viable, she was forced to terminate her pregnancy in another state, due to restrictions in Texas.
Looking into the lens, she accuses: “It’s because of Donald Trump.”
“Roe v. Wade»
And more precisely because of the role played by the former president in the end of the “Roe v. Wade”, decided in June 2022 by the Supreme Court.
On January 22, America marks the 51st anniversary of the ruling which in 1973 established a constitutional right to voluntary termination of pregnancy throughout the country.
This right was shattered a year and a half ago. The Supreme Court, which became very conservative following the appointments made by Donald Trump, ruled that the right to abortion was not guaranteed by the Constitution, and that the American states had jurisdiction in the matter.
Since then, around twenty of them have banned or very severely limited voluntary terminations of pregnancies.
Donald Trump, the overwhelming favorite in the Republican primary, recently said he was “proud” of having contributed to the reversal of jurisprudence.
And Kamala Harris intends to use this statement from the 77-year-old tycoon against him.
“Proud that doctors can be thrown in prison? Proud that young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers? exclaims the vice-president, according to excerpts transmitted in advance of her speech on Monday.
Abortion remains a historic fault line in the United States, even polls show that a majority of Americans are today in favor of a right to abortion.
This allowed Joe Biden to limit the damage during the mid-term legislative elections in the fall of 2022.
The American president wants to believe that he will benefit from the same momentum in November.
Kamala Harris
This offensive will also be a test of the electoral strike force of Kamala Harris, the first woman and first African-American in her post, who has been plowing the ground for several weeks, and with whom the American press has so far not been kind. .
The 59-year-old Democrat, whom the Republican opposition crushes at the slightest opportunity, recently received a rare, and undoubtedly unintentional, compliment from a Fox News channel columnist.
“What Kamala is doing (in terms of campaigning on abortion rights) has a powerful impact on young women,” commented a former spokesperson for Donald Trump, Kayleigh McEnany, on the conservatives’ favorite channel.
Access to abortion “will be an important subject in states where it is not yet guaranteed,” believes Melissa DeRosa, a strategist close to the Democratic Party.
“In states where people believe that this right is already protected (…), they will think more about economic issues, immigration, crime…” she predicts, however.
It also remains to be seen to what extent the subject will mobilize opponents of abortion in November, who are not giving up.
Several thousand demonstrators took to the streets of Washington on Friday, under the snow, chanting: “Abortion is killing.”
