Mrs Harris wants enshrine the protection of Roe v. Wade in federal law now that the Supreme Court has struck it down.
“When I am President of the United States, I will sign legislation that restores and protects reproductive freedom in every state,” she wrote in July. To do that, she would need not only Democratic majorities in Congress, but also 50 senators willing to abolish the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.
Ms. Harris said last year that she and President Biden envisioned a law that would mirror Roe. As amended by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected abortion rights until a fetus could survive outside the womb but allowed bans after that point as long as they included exceptions for medical emergencies. “We're not trying to do anything that didn't exist before June of last year,” she told CBS News.
As a senator, she sponsored a bill called the Women's Health Protection Act, which would have gone slightly further than Roe by banning some state-level restrictions, such as requiring doctors to perform specific tests or have hospital admission privileges to perform abortions. She reiterated her support for it in 2022.
She also argued, when she was running for president in 2019, that states with a history of restricting abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to “pre-clearance” for new abortion laws, meaning those laws would have to be federally approved before they could take effect. Her campaign did not respond to a request for confirmation whether she would still support this if Congress codified Roe. (Without such codification, the proposal is irrelevant.)
In the absence of majorities in Congress that could codify Roe, the Biden administration has taken administrative action to try limit the effects of state abortion bansand Ms Harris has indicated that she supports these actions.
The Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in 2022 that an emergency care law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requires doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it’s necessary to stabilize a patient. (That guidance is subject to legal challenges that the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on.) In April, the same department announced a rule that would shield the medical records of many abortion patients from investigators and prosecutors.
