ATLANTA (LifeSiteNews) – Sitting Vice President and Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris delivered a campaign speech Friday in Atlanta during which she repeated the abortion lobby’s false claims that a resident named Amber Thurman was killed by the state’s pro-life law while in the process winning left-wing accolades for “normalizing” abortion.
“Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia died — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris claimed. “One — and we heard about her story last night — a vibrant, 28-year-old young woman. She was ambitious. You know, we — I talked with her mother and her sisters about her, and they described such an extraordinary life of a person. She was excited. She was working hard. She was a medical assistant. She was going to nursing school, raising her six-year-old son (…) and she had her future all planned out, and it was her plan.”
“She had her plan, what she wanted to do for her son, for herself, for their future,” Harris continued. “And so, when she discovered that she was pregnant, she decided she wanted to have an abortion, but because of the Trump abortion ban here in Georgia, she was forced to travel out of state to receive the health care that she needed. But when she returned to Georgia, she needed additional care, so she went to a hospital. But, you see, under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed.”
However, as explained by Live Action, the sepsis for which Thurman “needed additional care” is a known (albeit rare) potential risk of the abortion pills she was given out of state; Georgia law only prohibits dilation & curettage (D&C) procedures being used to commit abortions, not to remove un-expelled fetal remains after an abortion; and that the original report publicizing her story admitted that the medical staff involved “declined to explain their thinking” as to why they chose not to perform a D&C.
Harris also alluded to the story of a second purported victim of Georgia’s abortion regime, but did not name or elaborate on Candi Miller’s story, the record of which Live Action has similarly corrected. Contrary to dominant left-wing narratives, every state with abortion bans currently on the books allows life-saving care to women in medical emergencies, even if a baby’s life will be lost in the process, and according to experts direct abortion is never medically necessary.
Nevertheless, the vice president’s speech won praise from far-left writer Jessica Valenti, author of a notorious 2014 column about how “abortion made my life better” because “I was able to publish my first book, meet my now-husband, cultivate the life that I’m living and build the family that I love,” and that abortion is fine because “sometimes you just don’t want to be pregnant.”
Writing Friday on her “Abortion, Every Day” Substack, Valenti swooned over Harris doing “something in her remarks that no one running for president ever has: She spoke about abortion as a normal part of a person’s life. Not a tragedy or an impossible choice, but a decision a young woman made in service of the life she wanted for herself.”
“Too often, the abortion stories that politicians feel comfortable sharing are those that were medical necessities or the result of a tragic diagnosis,” she said. “But here, Harris spoke plainly about the most common kind of abortion — one that’s done simply because a woman doesn’t want to be pregnant anymore. Because it doesn’t fit in with what she wants or has planned for her life.”
“That kind of abortion is as moral and important as any other, and Harris spoke about it as such. There’s no overstating how important that is,” Valenti declared.
Harris is running on an absolutist abortion-on-demand platform that includes taxpayer funding of abortion, opposing any and all limits on the practice, signing a law forcing all 50 states to permit abortion again, and most recently abolishing the Senate filibuster to get such a law to her desk.
Her Republican opponent, former President Donald Trump, now opposes further federal action on abortion and supports letting abortion pills be distributed by mail, and has caused consternation among current and former pro-life supporters by moving to the center on the issue. At the same time, Democrats’ absolutism on the issue and other far-left positions are expected to keep most conservatives and Republicans resigned to accepting him as preferable.
Harris currently leads Trump by 1.9% in RealClearPolitics’ popular vote polling average and by 3.6% to 3.9% according to RaceToTheWH (depending on whether former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is counted), but margins remain extremely close in the swing states that will decide the Electoral College outcome.