Kamala Harris said on Thursday that Donald Trump’s comment that he would protect women “whether the women like it or not” showed that the Republican presidential nominee does not understand women’s “agency, their authority, their right and their ability to make decisions about their own lives, including their own bodies”.
“I think it’s offensive to everybody, by the way,” Harris said before she set out to spend the day campaigning in the western swing states of Arizona and Nevada.
Trump appointed three of the justices to the US supreme court who formed the conservative majority that overturned federal abortion rights. As fallout from the 2022 decision spreads, Trump has taken to boasting at public events and in social media posts that he would “protect women” and make sure they would not be “thinking about abortion”.
At a rally on Wednesday evening near Green Bay, Wisconsin, Trump told his supporters that aides had urged him to stop using the phrase because it was “inappropriate”.
He told the crowd that he told aides: “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not. I am going to protect them.’”
Harris said the remark was part of a pattern of troubling statements by Trump. “This is just the latest on a long series of reveals by the former president of how he thinks about women and their agency,” she said.
Trump and Republicans have struggled with how to talk about abortion rights, particularly as women nationwide face abortion restrictions that have gone far beyond the ability to end an unwanted pregnancy.
Trump has given contradictory answers, saying that women should be punished for having abortions and bragging about appointing the justices. During his successful 2016 campaign, he told voters if elected he would appoint justices to the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade and said he was “pro-life”.
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But in recent weeks he has promised to veto a national abortion ban, after repeatedly refusing to make such a pledge. He has said the states should regulate care and said some laws were “too tough”.
