Vice President Kamala Harris refused to support any limits on abortion over the weekend, fueling conservative claims about her party supporting “abortion up until birth.”
In a Sunday interview on CBS’s Face the Nation, interviewer Margaret Brennan asked Harris about her stance on federal abortion laws, but the vice president dodged questions on limitations.
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“We need to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade,” Harris responded after she was asked specifically about minimum week restrictions for the procedure. “We’re not trying to do something new.”
But Brennan explained that the Roe framework was “nebulous because it was about viability, which could be anywhere between 20 to 24 weeks.”
“That’s, that was in the Women’s Health Protection Act that the White House also endorsed,” the host continued.
“No, no, no, no, no. Let me be very clear,” Harris interjected. “Let me be very clear. From day one, the president has been clear, I have been clear. We need to put back the protections that are in Roe v. Wade into law. Since the Supreme Court took it, Congress has the power and ability to pass legislation to put those protections back in law, and Joe Biden will sign that bill. So that is what we want.”
Harris’s comments come on the heels of conservatives pointing out that Democrats will rarely take a position on limiting abortion and that many of them support late-term abortion.
“Despite her call for Roe, her actions tell a different story,” SBA Pro-Life America’s Vice President of Communications E.V. Osment told the Washington Examiner. “Democrats are pushing federal legislation through the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA), which goes much further than Roe. It will strip all pro-life states of their existing pro-life protections forcing an entitlement of no-limits abortion through all trimesters, including stripping parental consent and no requirement for doctors to be the only ones performing abortions.”
As the Washington Examiner reported, Democrats have supported expansive, late-term abortion measures at the state and federal levels — including the Women’s Health Protection Act.
While the WHPA passed the House, it failed in the Senate 51-49, with Harris presiding over the tight vote in case she needed to break a tie. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the lone Democrat to vote against the bill, causing its failure, said: “They’re trying to make people believe that this is the same thing as codifying Roe v. Wade. And I want you to know, it’s not. This is not the same. It expands abortion.”
Commenting on the bill’s failure, Harris said: “It also makes clear that a priority for all who care about this issue — a priority should be to elect pro-choice leaders at the local, the state, and the federal level, because what we are seeing around this country are extremist Republican leaders who are seeking to criminalize and punish women for making decisions about their own body.”
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Harris’s office did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
“Multi-million-dollar Democratic supporters like NARAL and Planned Parenthood aren’t shy about wanting no restrictions or limits on abortions either,” Osment said. “Today there are already seven states plus Washington D.C. that allow all-trimester abortions without any restrictions.”
