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 said. wrote in JulyTo do that, she would need not only a Democratic majority 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 had exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not trying to do anything that didn’t exist before June of last year,” she said. told CBS News.
As a senator she was was a sponsor of a bill called the Women’s Health Protection Act that 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 the 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 Mrs. Harris has indicated support for those actions.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare told hospitals in 2022 that a law regarding emergency care, the Emergency Medical Assistance and Labor Actrequires doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it is necessary to stabilize a patient. (That directive is subject to legal challenges that the Supreme Court has so far declined to rule on.) In April, the same department announced a rule to protect the medical records of many abortion patients from investigators and prosecutors.
