At Abortion Clinic Visit, Harris Says U.S. Is Confronting ‘Health Care Crisis’

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Vice President Kamala Harris described the flood of laws restricting abortion access as a “health care crisis” as she visited with abortion providers and staff members Thursday at a clinic in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The stop by Harris at the Planned Parenthood clinic was believed to be the first official visit by a vice president to an abortion clinic. No presidents are known to have made such visits, either.

Speaking to reporters in the lobby of the clinic, which was open and seeing patients, Harris assailed conservative “extremists” for passing laws that restrict abortion, resulting in the denial of emergency care for pregnant women and the shuttering of clinics that provide reproductive health care beyond abortion.

“These attacks against an individual’s right to make decisions about their own body are outrageous and, in many instances, just plain old immoral,” she said. “How dare these elected leaders believe they are in a better position to tell women what they need, to tell women what is in their best interest. We have to be a nation that trusts women.”

The image alone of the nation’s second-ranking leader walking into an abortion clinic provided a vivid illustration of how the politics of abortion rights have transformed since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In the lobby was a map showing Planned Parenthood clinics in Minnesota and neighboring states. Minnesota had by far the most, with a few in Iowa. Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota were almost bare — all have restricted abortion access since the overturning of Roe.

For decades, many Democrats viewed affirmative support for abortion rights as a political risk, fearing such a position could alienate more moderate voters who were uncomfortable with open discussion of the procedure. The party embraced cautious slogans such as “safe, legal and rare” and policies including banning taxpayer funding of abortions.

But the fall of Roe upended those politics, energizing a new generation of voters around their support for abortion rights. The issue has become one of the Democrats’ biggest strengths, party strategists say. In campaign speeches, as he did in his State of the Union address, President Joe Biden casts the issue of abortion rights as one of personal freedom and the right to make private health care decisions.

Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who has been surveying voters about abortion for more than four decades, said she could not recall a time when abortion rights were as motivating for their voters.

“It’s the No. 1 issue working for Democrats at every level in office,” Lake said. “Everything from county commissioners to presidents are being elected around this issue.”

The issue is firmer ground for Democrats. Harris was visiting Minnesota a week after 19% of voters in the Democratic primary voted for “uncommitted,” as many of them treated it as a protest against the administration’s policies in the Gaza Strip.

After little discussion of abortion during Biden’s 2020 campaign, his strategists are embracing the issue. They’ve run ads featuring the testimonials of women denied access to the procedure in conservative states and attacked former President Donald Trump for appointing three of the justices who voted to overturn Roe.

Democrats’ efforts have been helped by a steady drumbeat of litigation, legislation and court decisions in conservative states that restrict not only abortion but also other aspects of reproductive health, including contraception and fertility treatments.

Tresa Undem, a pollster who tracks public opinion about abortion, said those actions had changed how voters — particularly women — view the role of government in their reproductive health care.

Recent polling from KFF, a nonprofit group focused on health policy, found that 86% of female voters of reproductive age say decisions about abortions should be made by a woman, in consultation with her doctor. Broad majorities also want laws guaranteeing a national right to abortion, access to abortion for patients facing pregnancy-related emergencies and the right to travel to get an abortion.

“They are scared about their own mortality,” Undem said. “And they don’t want politicians or the government to have any say in the circumstances and the reasons, the why and the when.”

Biden has promised to restore federal abortion rights and preserve access to medication abortion, which faces new threats from a case set to be argued before the Supreme Court this month. Those assurances represent a notable escalation for Biden, an observant Catholic who spent decades caught between his religious opposition to the procedure and the policy of his party.

But Biden has still expressed some uneasiness with the procedure itself, often avoiding uttering the word “abortion.”

It is Harris who has emerged as the administration’s most forceful champion of abortion rights, touring the country to highlight the actions taken by the administration to preserve abortion access. She has taken a far more assertive approach than the president, holding meetings about the topic with hundreds of state lawmakers, meeting with abortion doctors and patients and speaking about the once-taboo issue in plain language.

“Please do understand that when we talk about a clinic such as this, it is absolutely about health care and reproductive health care. So everyone get ready for the language: uterus,” she said, speaking outside the clinic in St. Paul. “Issues like fibroids. We can handle this.”

Nearly all of her stops have been in Democratic-led states that have become havens for abortion seekers, as broad swaths of the South and the Midwest have ushered in more restrictive laws.

On Thursday, at St. Paul Health Center, Vandalia, where Harris was speaking, about two dozen anti-abortion protesters stood in the street outside holding signs that read “Planned Parenthood = Abortion” and “Abortion is not healthcare.”

A doctor at the clinic said it had experienced a 25% increase in abortions and a 100% increase in out-of-state patients since Roe was overturned.

“Minnesota has become a bastion of access for abortion care,” said Dr. Sarah Traxler, the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood North Central States. “Our new abortion landscape is difficult. It is dangerous. And it is putting my patients and health care providers at severe risk.”

White House officials say they have largely reached the limits of their power to protect abortion rights. Legislation codifying federal abortion rights has failed twice and has no chance of passage, given the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate and disagreements within the president’s own party over the scope of such a bill.

Administration officials have encouraged Democratic state legislators to take a proactive role on the issue. Last year, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz signed legislation enshrining abortion rights into state law, an effort to ensure the procedure remains legal no matter who takes office in the state.

The Society of Family Planning, a health research organization, found that the average number of abortions in the state increased by about 36% in the year after the Supreme Court decision.

“What happened here in Minnesota with the reelection of the governor and the turning of the state Legislature, is what has led to ensuring that these fundamental rights are intact and are protected,” said Harris, before leaving the clinic for a Women for Biden-Harris rally in St. Paul. “Elections matter.”

At the campaign rally later in the afternoon, Harris put the blame for what has happened post-Roe on Trump, calling him “the architect of a health care crisis.”

The former president, she said, was “proud that women across our nation are suffering, proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .