‘It’s a winning issue’: Dems go all-in on abortion rights campaign ahead of November election

BY: CAITLIN SIEVERS – AUGUST 1, 2024 7:05 AM

On the first day of the general election campaign in Arizona, Democrats in the Grand Canyon State and across the country are betting on passionate pro-choice voters, and those scared of the health consequences of all-out abortion bans, to bring them victory in races across the board in November. 

“Look, it’s a winning issue,” Mini Timmaraju, president of Reproductive Freedom for All, told the Arizona Mirror after a reproductive rights-focused roundtable in Phoenix on Wednesday. 

The roundtable, hosted by the Kamala Harris campaign, was one of two such events at which Timmaraju spoke on Wednesday, the day after Arizona’s primary election. Just after the Harris event, Timmaraju headed to a similar one hosted by Democratic Congressman Ruben Gallego, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat against Republican Kari Lake. 

Democratic campaigns are putting reproductive rights front and center running up to the general election in November, with the two back-to-back events in the Valley on Wednesday, in addition to a press call hosted by the Democratic National Convention on the same day that highlighted the abortion extremism embraced by former president Donald Trump. 

The bet is that the hyper-focus on reproductive rights and women’s health will pay dividends up and down the ballot for Democrats this year, building on successes in a string of states — including deep red ones, like Kansas — where voters have resoundingly sided against Republicans and their draconian abortion bans since the U.S. Supreme Court stripped the right to abortion from American women in 2022.

These events happened the same day that J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, made his first campaign stop in Arizona. 

The women who spoke at the Harris event focused on Vance’s past statements about abortion, including his desire for a nationwide ban, as well as Trump’s appointment of three U.S. Supreme Court justices who helped to overturn Roe v. Wade and end the national right to abortion. 

“We knew in 2017 when Trump became president we were on the road to overturning Roe,” Timmaraju told the crowd. “Folks didn’t take it seriously. We have the opportunity now to make sure Americans take it seriously when they hear about Project 2025.” 

Project 2025 is a creation of the Heritage Foundation — a nearly 900-page proposal that sets forth a sweeping conservative agenda to be enacted if Trump is elected. 

Trump has distanced himself from the platform, but some former members of his administration helped to write it.

Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes chimed in to comment on Vance’s opposition to IVF, saying that men like him don’t want women like her to have children. 

Mayes conceived using IVF, when she realized she wanted to have children after she had turned 40 years old. 

But Mayes was not the only woman to share a personal story, hoping to capture the attention of Americans who care about reproductive freedom and womens’ health. 

Kaitlyn Kash, a Texas mother of two, shared the painful details of her experience with the Lone Star State’s abortion ban as she desperately tried to grow her family from three to four. 

At 13 weeks of pregnancy, just 45 days after the 2021 Texas fetal heartbeat bill went into effect, Kash learned that her baby had a lethal abnormality that would make it unlikely to survive birth. 

“Our baby would suffocate after being born,” Kash said. “I really wanted that pregnancy.”

She cried, waiting in silence, she said, for her doctor to give her options. 

“As a mother, I was waiting to hear how I was going to take away my child’s pain,” Kash said. 

Instead, her doctor told her she needed to seek a second opinion, but to be sure she did it outside of Texas. 

“I was being turned away from care that was protecting my physical, my mental health — and the process of growing my family in the future,” Kash said. 

Later that month, she flew hundreds of miles away to get an abortion. After that, as she continued the effort to grow her family, Kash had a miscarriage. She said she was denied the abortion drug mifepristone at the pharmacy, which would help empty her uterus and protect her fertility going forward. 

After another miscarriage, Kash finally gave birth to a baby girl around a year ago, but almost bled to death from a hemorrhage while waiting two hours for a medical procedure to remove the placenta from her uterus. 

“I’m here today because my story will become more and more peoples’ reality if we do not elect Kamala Harris,” she said. 

Kash is one of numerous Texas women who have had to wait for desperately needed medical care or had to travel out of state for an abortion that was medically necessary, following the state’s increasingly restrictive abortion laws. 

During the DNC press call on Wednesday, Amanda Zurowski denounced Trump’s role in overturning Roe v. Wade and warned that awarding him the presidency would endanger women across the country. The Texan shared how her life has been impacted by her state’s 6-week abortion ban since the constitutional right to abortion was struck down. 

In the summer of 2022, Zurowski suffered a premature membrane rupture at 18 weeks of pregnancy and her doctor told her she would need an abortion. But just two days after her water broke, Texas’ 6-week ban went into effect and Zurowski was told she couldn’t receive any help until she became so sick she was actually dying — to ensure that her doctor wouldn’t face criminal charges and a 99-year prison sentence. 

Three days and a bout of septic shock later, Zurowski’s doctor was finally able to intervene. But shortly after delivering, she suffered another septic shock and was transferred to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where she stayed for three days and her family spent what they feared would be Zurowski’s final hours with her. 

“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric and it didn’t need to happen. But it did because of Donald Trump,” Zurowski said. 

Zurowski pointed to Project 2025 as proof that a second Trump administration would be devastating for women’s health care, and called on voters to support pro-choice candidates . 

“Reproductive freedom is on the ballot this November,” she said. “This November, I am voting like my life depends on it — because it does.” 

 Jessica Mackler, president of EMILYs List, an influential political action committee that helps elect pro-choice Democratic women to elected office, touted Harris as the solution to the anti-abortion movement. The proliferation of abortion bans, she said, can be resolved by delivering wins to Democrats in state legislatures and at the federal level. 

“We can restore our rights, we can beat back further Republican attacks — and we can do that by securing pro-choice majorities up and down the ballot,” Mackler said. “That starts with Vice President Kamala Harris.”  

While Trump has previously backed a 15-week national ban before his current position that states should decide for themselves, and has struggled to distance himself from Project 2025, Harris has been a consistent defender of abortion access. During President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, she traveled to states with hostile abortion laws on the books, including Arizona, to highlight the president’s commitment to enshrining Roe in federal law. 

And she has continued to push that message in her campaign for president.  

Mackler called Trump’s effort to cut ties with Project 2025 a “desperate, empty gesture,” and said voters won’t be so easily fooled. EMILYs List, she added, will work to foil Republican attempts to obscure their anti-abortion stances. 

During the Harris event, Mayes told the crowd that Harris was one of the first people to call her when the Arizona Supreme Court ruled this spring that a now-rescinded 1864 total abortion ban was enforceable. 

Other speakers said they hope to help voters understand just how high the stakes are this year.

“What’s at stake this November is your life,” Kash said. “The life of your daughter, your sister, your aunt.”

Timmaraju added that she thinks the path to victory for Harris runs through Arizona. 

“We have to deliver the White House, the Senate and the House so we can restore the right to abortion in all 50 states,” she said. 

After the event, she told the Mirror that Democrats are leaning so hard into the issue of abortion access because it’s a “five-alarm fire” that also demonstrates a clear contrast between the two major parties. Democrats, led by Harris and Biden, have been fighting for abortion access since Roe was overturned while Republicans have labored to restrict access and seem to be considering putting restrictions on IVF and birth control as well. 

“It’s a really obvious place for Democrats to go, but it’s also frankly what we need to be doing at this moment to basically meet a humanitarian crisis in this country,” Timmaraju said.

This article was originally published by the Arizona Mirror.