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Vice President Kamala Harris is putting the battle over reproductive rights on centre stage as the Biden-Harris re-election bid seeks to capitalise on strong opposition to conservative victories ahead of November’s showdown with Donald Trump.
Ms Harris will be in Minnesota on Thursday where she is expected to appear at a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortion services, although details of the visit are under stricter guard than what would typically be released about a campaign stop headlined by the vice president. The visit was first reported by NBC News just a day before it was set to occur, and the news was not attributed to any White House spokesperson, only sources with knowledge of Ms Harris’s plans.
Her planned visit is thought to be the first time any sitting president or vice president has appeared at a clinic that provides abortion services.
According to White House guidance, Ms Harris will speak to reporters at some point during the visit, while media reports indicate that she may speak to patients and health care professionals inside the Planned Parenthood location; it’s not yet clear if cameras will be rolling while she is in the facility itself and the official White House press guidance does not even mention that the visit will take place at a clinic. Privacy concerns for both patients and doctors come into play given the nature of the location as well as the tendency of right-wing groups to target both women who receive abortion care as well as the doctors who provide it.
Unlike in other states where abortion restrictions are tighter, Planned Parenthood operates more than 10 locations across Minnesota. The vice president’s visit which will also include a more traditional campaign stop will take place in the Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St Paul, though the exact clinic to be visited has not been identified.
Ms Harris and Mr Biden have launched an aggressive campaign schedule over the month of March and may be seeking to gain momentum for their re-election bid as rival Donald Trump’s legal woes (and the associated financial costs) pile up. The two are set to visit North Carolina in the coming days, while Mr Biden was in another swing state, Wisconsin, on Wednesday.
Reproductive rights are set to be a central campaign issue for Democrats up and down the ballot in 2024 following the party’s success with running on the issue in the 2022 midterms; that cycle ended with disappoinment for their Republican opponents, who saw a Democratic majority expand slightly in the Senate while they were only able to carve out a thin, unsteady majority in the House of Representatives (which has since trickled further down into single digits). Some of the best-performing Democrats nationwide that year were purple-state candidates like Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, who won re-election while embracing a strong defence of reproductive freedoms.
Mr Biden himself condemned the decision of the Supreme Court tossing out abortion protections established in Roe v Wade during his state of the union address last week, notably doing so while the Court’s justices were present in the chamber to hear his remarks.