Kamala Harris: a reproductive rights advocate after Biden announced that he would drop out of the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race in support of reproductive healthcare reform

Reproductive rights organizations have been quick to come out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential nominee after President Joe Biden announced on Sunday that he would drop out of the presidential race and endorse Harris instead.

Harris believes that her mother, who died of breast-cancer, was a major influence on her when she was a child.

Harris has long promoted action on climate as well as environmental justice, says Leah Stokes, a climate-policy researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Harris was a champion for communities at the forefront of fossil fuel pollution when he was a district attorney in San Francisco. Harris worked on the environment and public health as a senator.

As senator, Harris co-sponsored efforts to improve the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM) workforce. She introduced legislation to aid students from underrepresented populations to obtain jobs and work experience in STEM fields. She proposed to invest $60 billion to fund historically Black universities and bolster black-owned businesses as a candidate in the Democratic presidential nomination race in 2020.

The National Space Council is charged with advising the president of US space policy and strategy. The body has focused on international cooperation under Harris, which includes the Artemis mission which is to send astronauts to the Moon.

It is still unclear who Harris will choose to be her running mate if she receives the party nomination. One contender is Mark Kelly, an Arizona Senator and former astronaut, who would bring his decades of experience in science and engineering to the position if chosen.

Harris might be even more supportive of reproductive health care than Biden, who has been hesitant to speak directly about abortion. Biden, a practicing Catholic, has said that he isn’t “big on abortion” and even opposed it in his early days as a senator, but his views have evolved over the years.

It is unknown if she will embrace progressive health policies or choose a path that would appeal to centrist and independent voters, according to an organization that studies women’s health policy. TheAffordable Care Act, a priority for the Biden campaign, will likely be maintained by her.

The Biden-Harris administration has also made drug pricing a key priority by creating a cap for the price of insulin and by endorsing the use of ‘march-in rights’, in which the government could intervene to set the price of innovations created using public funds. In 2019, Harris co-sponsored legislation that would have created an independent agency to determine appropriate drug prices.

Peter Maybarduk, director of the access to medicines programme at the advocacy organization Public Citizen, based in Washington DC, praised these actions, and said he hoped they would continue under a potential Harris administration, “The Biden-Harris administration has been by far the strongest yet in challenging outrageous drug prices and starting the country down a long road toward medicine affordability,” he says.

According to a Pew Research Center poll, almost six out of every 10 American voters think that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Support for abortion rights, after they were dramatically curtailed by the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022, is thought to have fueled important Democratic wins in the past year. “The fact that she’s willing to talk about this is going to be enormous, because that’s a winning issue for Democrats,” says Melissa Murray, an expert in reproductive rights at New York University, in New York City. “It’s a major point of differentiation between the two parties and the person who can make that case most clearly to the American public, I think will be in a stronger position.”

Harris wants reproductive justice to include access to contraceptive and abortion, according to Murray. The vice-president has advocated for maternal health issues more broadly, highlighting the need to combat implicit bias against black women in healthcare. This approach “takes seriously the needs of women of color, who are perhaps more deeply affected by assaults on reproductive freedom, as we’ve seen in the two years since Dobbs,” Murray says.

“Harris and Biden are in lockstep on climate, and that’s exactly what we need,” says Stokes. We can’t afford four more years of progress when our goal is just around the corner.

“We’re incredibly excited that we have somebody who has a long track record in fighting for abortion access as potentially being the person who’s at the top of the presidential ticket for the Democratic Party,” said Nourbese Flint, president of All* Above All, a group that supports public insurance coverage of abortion, in an interview with WIRED.

Elisa Wells, cofounder of the nonprofit Plan C, which provides information on self-managed, at-home abortion with pills, told WIRED that she expects Harris to bring “strong leadership” on reproductive rights and have a “bold agenda” to restore legal access to abortion.

The Kaiser Family Foundation Executive Vice President for Health Policy, Larry Levitt wrote in an email that the abortion rights groups will be thrilled to have a candidate who will forcefully campaign on reproductive health access.

Access to abortion has dwindled across the US following the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, the 50-year-old landmark case that protected the right to have an abortion. Three justices appointed by former president Donald Trump—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—were among the five who made up the majority opinion to repeal Roe. The decision opened the door for states to ban abortion outright, and more than a dozen have done so.

In the speech, she talked about the case of a Wisconsin couple, Meaghan and Joe, who found out they were pregnant and that their unborn fetus had a severe genetic disorder, that put her life at risk. Meaghan was unable to obtain an abortion in Wisconsin and had to travel to Minnesota to receive care.