Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Arizona on Friday, hoping to use this week’s restrictive abortion ruling to mobilize voters who see November’s election as a referendum on women’s health rights.
Her visit to the battleground state comes on the heels of the Arizona Supreme Court ruling that revived a 160-year-old law barring all abortions except in cases when “it is necessary to save” a pregnant person’s life — thrusting abortion politics into the spotlight.
Harris has been crisscrossing the country as part of her reproductive rights tour since January, arguing that abortion rights hang in the balance with the results of the election. Last month, Harris visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in Minnesota becoming the first sitting vice president or president to visit an abortion provider.
And at her campaign event Friday, Harris is expected to cast the court ruling as “one of the biggest aftershocks yet” since the overturning of Roe.
“Here in Arizona, they have turned the clock back more than a century on women’s rights and freedoms. The overturning of Roe was a seismic event. And this ban in Arizona is one of the biggest aftershocks yet,” Harris will say, according to prepared remarks. “We all must understand who is to blame. It is the former president, Donald Trump.”
Democrats have seized on abortion ahead of November, seeing it as a salient political issue that could spur moderate voters — particularly women — to turn out in droves against former President Donald Trump by tying the abortion bans directly to him.
Both Biden and Harris have repeatedly campaigned on Trump’s bragging that he crafted the conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade — which had federally protected the right to…
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