Kamala Harris: A Conservative, Reproductive Rights Advocate for the Democratic Candidate and President Joe Biden During His Presidency

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’s mother was a breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer, so she was influenced by that as a child.

Harris has been promoting action on both climate and environmental justice, says a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a district attorney in San Francisco and then attorney general for the state of California, Harris became a champion for communities on the front lines of fossil fuel pollution, Stokes says. Harris followed a similar path with work on public health and the environment as a senator from 2017-2021.

Harris was co-sponsored efforts to improve the diversity of the science, technology, engineering and medicine workforce. She wants to make it easier for underrepresented students to get jobs in the fields of science, technology, Engineering and mathematics. And as a candidate in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, she proposed a plan to invest $60 billion to fund historically Black universities and bolster Black-owned businesses.

The National Space Council is charged with advising the president on US space policy and strategy. The Artemis mission which aims to send astronauts to the Moon is one of the things that has been done under the leadership of Harris.

If Harris receives the party nomination, she will have to pick a running mate. 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.

President Biden is hesitant to speak about abortion during his presidency, but Harris is more enthusiastic about reproductive health care. 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 still unknown whether she will embrace these kinds of progressive health policies or choose a path that might be more appealing to independent and centrist voters, says Alina Salganicoff, director for women’s health policy at the health-policy research organization KFF, based in San Francisco, California. “I anticipate she’s going to be a staunch defender of maintaining and supporting the Affordable Care Act, which has also been a priority for the Biden campaign,” she says.

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, said that he hoped they would continue under a potential Harris administration and praised these actions for challenging outrageous drug prices.

This has been a major issue for voters in the US, with 63% of the population saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases according to a poll by the Pew Research Center in Washington DC. The votes for abortion rights were dramatically limited after the decision in Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but they are thought to have helped the Democrats. “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 is a big point of distinction between the two parties and the person who can make that case most clearly to the American public, I think would be in a stronger position.

The Biden administration was trying to ensure that women have access to reproductive healthcare, according to Harris. “We trust women. We trust women to make decisions about their own bodies. She said that women are trusted to know what is in their own best interests.

If she prevails in November, Harris is expected to maintain both the momentum and the unprecedented investments that Biden has injected into the climate movement in the United States. This includes upwards of US$1 trillion in funding for clean energy and climate change over a decade, a legislative accomplishment that many energy experts say could sharply reduce US greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades.

Voting for Reproductive Health Access in the 2020 White House: The Story of a Wisconsin couple who had an abortion while traveling to Minnesota to get an abortion

“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.

The female co-worker of the nonprofit Plan C told WIRED she expects Harris to bring strong leadership on reproductive rights, and to restore legal access to abortion.

“Abortion rights groups will certainly be thrilled to have a candidate who will forcefully campaign on reproductive health access,” wrote Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care research organization, in an email to WIRED.

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. Neil Gorsuch, one of Donald Trump’s appointees, was one of the five justices who voted to repeal the abortion law. More than a dozen have done so since the decision opened the door for them to ban abortion completely.

In the speech, she referred to abortion access as a “health care crisis” and shared the story of a Wisconsin couple, Meaghan and Joe, who discovered they were pregnant and that the fetus had a severe genetic disorder that put Meaghan’s life at risk. Meaghan had to travel to Minnesota to get an abortion because she was unable to get one in Wisconsin.