Ms. Harris needs 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 USA, 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 in addition 50 senators prepared to do away with the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to move most laws.
Ms. Harris stated final yr 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 might survive outdoors the womb however allowed bans after that time as long as they’d exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not attempting to do something that didn’t exist earlier than June of final yr,” she advised CBS Information.
As a senator, she was a sponsor of a invoice known as the Girls’s Well being Safety Act that might have gone considerably additional than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, equivalent to requiring medical doctors to carry out particular checks or to have hospital admitting privileges so as to present abortions. She reiterated her assist 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 spanking new abortion legal guidelines, that means these legal guidelines must be federally permitted earlier than they may take impact. Her marketing campaign didn’t reply to a request to verify whether or not she would nonetheless assist 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 results of state abortion bans, and Ms. Harris has indicated assist for these actions.
The Division of Well being and Human Providers advised hospitals in 2022 {that a} regulation pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Remedy and Labor Act, obligates medical doctors to carry out an abortion in the event that they consider it’s wanted to stabilize a affected person. (That steerage 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 defend many abortion sufferers’ medical data from investigators and prosecutors.
