Kamala Harris and Oprah humanized the consequences of state abortion bans
Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris attended a town hall style forum hosted by Oprah Winfrey in Michigan Thursday night. Harris received questions on most of the 2024 campaign cycle’s top issues, including guns and immigration — but a segment on abortion proved to be an emotional centerpiece that has continued to generate conversation.
That moment largely focused on a 28-year-old Black woman from Georgia named Amber Thurman, featured in a recent ProPublica report. Thurman died in August 2022 after doctors hesitated to treat her following a complication from a medication abortion.
After that year’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the right to an abortion guaranteed by Roe v. Wade, Georgia implemented a strict abortion law that severely limited the abortion-related care available to anyone more than six weeks pregnant.
Thurman was at least nine weeks pregnant; state law allows Georgia doctors to perform the procedure she required — a dilation and curettage, or D&C — only when the mother’s life is in danger. Doing so before then could result in a doctor going to prison for up to 10 years. At the time, the hospital reportedly had no guidance or policy in place about how to navigate the law and ascertain whether a pregnant person’s life was in danger. However, the ProPublica report suggests Thurman’s doctors waited too long — 20 hours after she went to her local hospital — before beginning to operate on her.
A state review found Thurman’s death was “preventable,” and that’s a theme her family stressed as they spoke with Harris and Winfrey.
“They just let her die because of some stupid abortion ban,” Thurman’s older sister said. “They treated her like she was just another number.”
Harris offered her condolences to Thurman’s family, and used the moment to argue that Thurman’s story underscores the need for a change for greater abortion rights — as well as the sort of abortion policy Democrats are running on.
Democrats are running on expanding abortion rights
In the wake of Dobbs, more than a dozen states have passed strict abortion bans; nearly a dozen others, including Georgia, have laws that severely limit who is able to access an abortion.
Georgia’s law, the LIFE Act, was initially passed in 2019 and upheld last year. It outlaws abortion once embryonic cardiac activity is detectable, something that usually occurs around five or six weeks of gestation. It does allow abortions past that point for “medical emergencies,” but is vague about when doctors should declare an emergency, other than defining them as a “condition in which an abortion is necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function of the pregnant woman.”
In many states, there have been efforts to overturn abortion laws — or keep them from being instituted. In Michigan, where the town hall was held, voters enshrined the right to abortion into the state’s constitution in 2023. In the wake of Dobbs, ballot initiatives to protect abortion access in Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Vermont, Montana, and California all passed. And this year, a new slate of states will decide whether to protect access.
“There are 10 states with ballot initiatives for this November,” said David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University who focuses on gender and abortion access. “Five of those states would change the current law in that state … going from [ending] a complete abortion ban [in] South Dakota and Missouri, to alleviating a six-week ban in Florida, a 15-week ban in Arizona, and a 12-week ban in Nebraska.”
Democrats have tied themselves to these initiatives, hoping that they boost turnout. The party successfully campaigned on abortion in the 2022 midterms, and made abortion a factor in several special elections that were Democratic wins. They hope to make the issue a central part of this year’s election too. According to the Pew Research Center, abortion is a top five issue for Democratic voters, and a top 10 issue for voters overall.
Harris has repeatedly attacked former President Donald Trump as being responsible for the end of Roe, arguing as she did Thursday, “The former president chose three members of the United States Supreme Court with the intention that they would overturn the protections of Roe v. Wade — and they did as he intended.”
Harris, meanwhile, has said that, as president, she would approve federal legislation protecting the right to abortion. The current model for that legislation is the 2023 Women’s Health Protection Act, which would prevent state governments from imposing restrictions on abortion rights pre-viability. (Of course, Harris would probably need a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate — which currently seems unlikely — for federal abortion protections to pass.)
For his part, Trump has bragged about being the president who overturned Roe, and has argued that abortion policy should be left to the states. He has said he would not approve a federal abortion ban if given another term. He has also sought to distance himself from Project 2025, the conservative vision for the US that includes draconian restrictions on women’s health care, rights, and freedom.
But that’s not to say that a second Trump term couldn’t make even abortion more difficult to access, including through the method he used the first time around: court appointments.