Ms. Harris wants to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law now that the Supreme Court has overturned it.
“When I am president of the United States, I will sign a law restoring and protecting reproductive freedom in every state,” she wrote in July. To do that, she would need not just Democratic majorities in Congress but also 50 senators willing to get rid of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.
Ms. Harris said last year that she and President Biden envisioned a law mirroring Roe. As modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected the right to abortion until a fetus could survive outside the womb but allowed bans after that point so long as they had exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not trying to do anything that did not exist before June of last year,” she told CBS News.
As a senator, she was a sponsor of a bill called the Women’s Health Protection Act that would have gone somewhat further than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, such as requiring doctors to perform specific tests or to have hospital admitting privileges in order to provide abortions. She reiterated her support for it in 2022.
She also argued, while running for president in 2019, that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to “pre-clearance” for new abortion laws, meaning those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. Her campaign did not respond to a request to confirm whether she would still support this if Congress codified Roe. (Without such codification, the proposal is moot.)
In the absence of congressional majorities capable of codifying Roe, Mr. Biden’s cabinet took administrative actions to try to limit the effects of state abortion bans, and Ms. Harris has indicated support for those actions.
The Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in 2022 that a law pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, obligates doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it is needed to stabilize a patient. (That guidance is subject to legal challenges on which the Supreme Court has so far declined to rule.) In April, the same department announced a rule to shield many abortion patients’ medical records from investigators and prosecutors.
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