As Americans began voting early in some states, Kamala Harris attacked Donald Trump on Friday, September 20, calling him the “architect” of the rollback of abortion rights and the resulting tragedies.
A frontal attack. “One in three women in America lives in a state where abortion is banned because of Trump,” denounced Kamala Harris during a rally in Atlanta (Georgia) on Friday, September 20. “This is a health crisis and Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis,” she attacked, recalling that the former president said he was “proud” to have appointed the conservative judges who allowed the turnaround of the highest American court.
While that charge was repeated almost verbatim hours later at a rally in Madison, Wisconsin, the vice president vowed to defend abortion, which has been severely restricted in many parts of the country since a 2022 Supreme Court ruling.
The Democratic candidate hammered home this argument 46 days before an election that, according to experts, should be marked by a record divergence between the female vote, which is rather favorable to her, and the male vote, more oriented towards the Republican candidate. In addition, Kamala Harris portrayed her Republican opponents as “hypocrites” who “claim to talk about what is in the interest of women and children”, while they “neglect” the problems of perinatal mortality or access to care for pregnant women and mothers.
Women “made to feel like criminals”
In a serious tone, the 59-year-old candidate recalled the fate of Amber Thurman, 28, who developed rare complications after taking an abortion pill and who died in August 2022 in Georgia, after not receiving treatment in time.
According to a report on the ProPublica website, an official commission in that state ruled that her death, which was “preventable,” was caused by a delay in performing the surgery that could have saved her, and that the delay was the result of the passage of a law criminalizing the procedure in question – a curettage of the uterus.
Kamala Harris then had the crowd chant Amber Thurman’s name and castigated the “unbearable judgment” of women seeking abortions, “who are made to feel like criminals.” Should women “wait until they are on the verge of death before we act? No one wants that,” she charged in Madison.
While President Joe Biden – whom she replaced at short notice in the race for the White House – avoided the word “abortion” as much as possible, the Democratic candidate handles this subject with much more ardor.
Early voting begins
While the election itself is on November 5, America has already started voting. Polls opened Friday for early voting in Virginia, Minnesota and South Dakota. “The election is here,” Harris insisted, mentioning those three states. “We have work to do to energize, organize, mobilize,” she said.
The aim of this arrangement is to improve voter turnout by allowing people who are unable to do so due to personal circumstances to vote and to reduce crowds on election day.
For his part, Donald Trump also went to Miami on Friday for a fundraising meeting. Indeed, money remains the lifeblood of a campaign that is expected to see the candidates spend a total of one billion dollars.
The outcome of the presidential election remains more uncertain than ever, however, with the two candidates neck and neck in several of the seven key states where everything will probably be decided. In Georgia, where Joe Biden won by less than 12,000 votes, the Republican billionaire is now being prosecuted for the pressure he is accused of having exerted in order to reverse the result.
