Vice President Kamala Harris visited Wisconsin on Monday to begin a national tour in support of reproductive rights and highlight steps the Biden administration has taken to navigate around restrictive abortion laws in the United States.
She assigned blame for those laws to one person in particular: Donald J. Trump.
“These extremists are trying to take us backward, but we’re not having that,” she told a crowd of cheering supporters in a painter’s union building outside of Milwaukee.
The vice president’s appearance, in front of a large banner that read “TRUST WOMEN,” was meant to add fire to an issue that Democrats believe could galvanize a broad swath of base voters and draw in independent ones.
Wisconsin is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. It was also a target of former Mr. Trump’s efforts to spread falsehoods about illegal voting in 2020.
Ms. Harris said Monday that Mr. Trump had appointed three Supreme Court justices who had worked to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion 51 years ago on Monday. In her speech, Ms. Harris referenced Mr. Trump’s recent comments that he was proud of his work.
“Proud that women across our nation are suffering?” Ms. Harris said, to applause. “Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? Proud that doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for their patients, that young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers? How dare he.”
Back in Washington on Monday afternoon, Mr. Biden met with members of the administration’s task force on reproductive rights. He criticized laws that ban abortion and framed the matter in terms of preserving personal freedoms, an argument that he and other Democrats have sharpened since Roe fell. He also reminded his audience that protecting abortion rights has been popular among voters whenever the issue appears on a state ballot.
“This is what it looks like when the right to privacy is under attack,” Mr. Biden said. “These extreme laws have no place, no place, in the United States of America.”
Also Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services issued guidance for patients experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies to better understand their rights to care under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA.
The law requires hospital emergency rooms to provide medically necessary care, including abortions, in urgent circumstances. The department will also provide “training materials for health care providers and establish a dedicated team of experts” to support hospitals around the country, according to a fact sheet distributed by the administration.
Those efforts may add to the legal challenges surrounding the administration’s efforts to bolster access to abortion. The administration is already in the middle of legal battles with Texas and Idaho over whether the law provides for the procedure. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Idaho case.
Kirsten Allen, the vice president’s press secretary, said that Ms. Harris’s office had planned several more stops in “states that have enshrined protections, restricted access and states that continue to threaten access, causing chaos and confusion.” Ms. Allen told reporters on Monday that Ms. Harris had plans to travel to California soon and then to a state in the South in support of abortion rights.
Democrats hope that a series of victories for abortion rights advocates in Wisconsin could signal a wider trend ahead of the general election. In April, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal candidate to the state’s Supreme Court by an 11-point margin. In September, Planned Parenthood began providing abortions again after a judge ruled that an 1849 state restriction against them — which had been invalidated by Roe until it fell — was not enforceable.
On Monday, Ms. Harris met with a medical provider who has felt constrained by state laws when trying to care for her patients, and with a couple who had tried to seek care during a pregnancy complication and had been turned away by doctors who were afraid to intervene.
The couple, who were not named but received a standing ovation from the crowd, left an impression with Kelly Gleeson, a stay-at-home mother of three who brought her 9-year-old daughter, Charlotte, to the event: “I can’t imagine that,” Ms. Gleeson said. “I can’t imagine being in such a dire situation and being told ‘we can’t help.’”
Across the room, Sarah Godlewski, the secretary of state of Wisconsin, said that Ms. Harris’s visit was important because “Wisconsin has seen firsthand how Republican extremists can control and quite frankly take away half the population’s rights to reproductive freedoms.”
The president and vice president plan to continue trying to draw a contrast between Republican-led efforts to restrict abortion and contraception and the Biden administration’s efforts to frame the issue as one rooted in protecting personal freedoms.
On Tuesday — the day of the New Hampshire primary — Ms. Harris will join Mr. Biden at a rally for abortion rights in Virginia, where Democrats recently took control of the legislature and have proposed to enshrine abortion protections in the state constitution. Jill Biden, the first lady, and Doug Emhoff, Ms. Harris’s husband, are also scheduled to attend.
In Wisconsin, Corinda Rainey-Moore, who has traveled to several events to see Ms. Harris speak, said it was important for the vice president to keep “connecting the dots” for voters about the work the administration is doing to support reproductive rights, and how votes can help preserve reproductive rights.
Both Ms. Harris and Mr. Biden called for the votes to elect lawmakers who would codify Roe’s protections into law, which will be an uphill battle.
“I think it’s the energy that’s needed, but also the message,” said Ms. Rainey-Moore. Voters need to know, she said, that “their voice is their power.”
