Ms. Harris desires to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal regulation now that the Supreme Court docket has overturned it.
“When I’m president of the US, I’ll signal a regulation restoring and defending reproductive freedom in each state,” she wrote in July. To do this, she would want not simply Democratic majorities in Congress but additionally 50 senators prepared to eliminate the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to move most laws.
Ms. Harris stated final 12 months that she and President Biden envisioned a regulation mirroring Roe. As modified by Deliberate Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected the precise to abortion till a fetus may survive outdoors the womb however allowed bans after that time as long as that they had exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not attempting to do something that didn’t exist earlier than June of final 12 months,” she informed CBS Information.
As a senator, she was a sponsor of a invoice known as the Girls’s Well being Safety Act that may have gone considerably additional than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, reminiscent of requiring docs to carry out particular checks or to have hospital admitting privileges as a way to present abortions. She reiterated her help for it in 2022.
She additionally argued, whereas operating for president in 2019, that states with a historical past of limiting abortion rights in violation of Roe must be topic to “pre-clearance” for brand new abortion legal guidelines, which means these legal guidelines must be federally authorized earlier than they might take impact. Her marketing campaign didn’t reply to a request to substantiate whether or not she would nonetheless help this if Congress codified Roe. (With out such codification, the proposal is moot.)
Within the absence of congressional majorities able to codifying Roe, Mr. Biden’s cupboard took administrative actions to attempt to restrict the consequences of state abortion bans, and Ms. Harris has indicated help for these actions.
The Division of Well being and Human Companies informed hospitals in 2022 {that a} regulation pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Remedy and Labor Act, obligates docs to carry out an abortion in the event that they imagine it’s wanted to stabilize a affected person. (That steering is topic to authorized challenges on which the Supreme Court docket has to this point declined to rule.) In April, the identical division introduced a rule to protect many abortion sufferers’ medical data from investigators and prosecutors.
