Ryan T. Anderson
(ZENIT News – First Thing / USA, 08.17.2024).- Kamala Harris is an abortion extremist. Her words and actions over the course of her career—as California’s attorney general, as United States senator, and as vice president—leave no doubt as to that fact. From targeting pro-life journalists and forcing pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion in her A.G. days, to voting to override state pro-life laws in her Senate days, she has repeatedly made clear her fealty to the abortion lobby. Since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee for the presidency, Harris has sown confusion about her political vision by reversing many of her own publicly stated positions. But one thing remains constant: Abortion is her top priority.
You’ve no doubt noticed Harris celebrating abortion. In March of this year, she visited a Planned Parenthood abortion facility. The New York Times declared a “Historic First,” with CNN reporting it as “the first time a sitting US president or vice president [had visited] an abortion provider.” Harris’s visit took place in Minnesota, the first state to enact pro-abortion legislation after Dobbs.
That legislation declared abortion a fundamental right, legalizing it through all nine months of pregnancy. A second bill removed virtually all health and safety protections for women, removed a 24-hour waiting period, permitted taxpayer funding of abortion, and repealed the state’s protection of children born alive after failed abortions. The governor who signed those two bills into law: Tim Walz, whom Harris yesterday announced as her running mate. Her choices—to visit a Planned Parenthood in Minnesota, a state competing to have the most permissive abortion regime in the nation, and to select Minnesota’s radically pro-abortion governor as her running mate—flow from her priorities.
Harris’s visit to Planned Parenthood took place during her national “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. This tour—meant to make abortion the centerpiece of what was then to be a Biden-Harris campaign—followed her fall 2023 “Fight for Our Freedoms College Tour.” That tour, as the White House explained, was meant to motivate students to “fight for reproductive freedom,” among other progressive desiderata.
The abortion tours are not merely symbolic. They express Harris’s extremism. During her failed presidential campaign in 2019, Harris explained to an MSNBC townhall audience the process by which she would preempt state pro-life laws: Under a Harris administration, any state pro-life law “would have to come before my Department of Justice for a review and approval” before it could take effect. You can imagine how many such laws would have received “approval.”
Since Dobbs v. Jackson, the Biden-Harris administration (as the White House now calls it) has promoted abortion and interfered with state pro-life laws, as Harris promised. The means are various. As my colleagues at the Ethics and Public Policy Center have documented, the Biden-Harris administration has turned Title X into an abortion counseling mandate, turned taxpayer dollars into abortion funds, turned emergency rooms and VA hospitals into abortion clinics, turned the United States Postal Service into an abortion pill delivery service, and turned protections for pregnant workers into an abortion mandate.
Harris has repeatedly declined to offer even hypothetical support to any protection for the unborn, or even the just-born. As a senator, she voted against the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which would have provided protections for unborn children at 20 weeks. She voted against the “Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act,” which would have required medical professionals to provide care to children who survive abortion procedures. Lacking this protection, such children can be abandoned, neglected, “allowed” to die.
Harris was an original Senate cosponsor of the “Women’s Health Protection Act of 2019,” which would have “impose[d] abortion on demand nationwide at any stage of pregnancy,” in the words of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—overriding state pro-life laws, including such modest measures as informed-consent requirements, parental notification, and waiting periods. When Harris presided over the 2022 Senate vote on this bill, she publicly lamented the bill’s failure to pass. The next year, in an interview with ABC News, she called on Congress to respond to the Dobbs decision by passing pro-abortion legislation, promising that Biden would sign it.
Harris wants to force all American taxpayers to pay for abortion. As a senator, she called for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, the bipartisan rider that has been attached to HHS appropriations since 1976 to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding abortions through Medicaid. Social scientist Michael New, who studies the impact of legislation on abortion rates, estimates that the Hyde Amendment has saved 2.5 million unborn babies. Harris also voted against the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion” act, which would have extended Hyde’s protection to the entirety of the federal government.
Harris wants to force pro-lifers to violate our consciences. In the Senate she supported legislation that threatened religious liberty, particularly in the context of abortion. She introduced and was lead sponsor of the perversely named “Do No Harm Act,” a bill that would narrow the Religious Freedom Restoration Act so as to withhold religious-liberty protections against abortion mandates. She was an original cosponsor of the similarly Orwellian “Equality Act,” which would have imposed radical gender ideology on the nation, and contained provisions that, as the USCCB warned, could have forced “taxpayers to fund elective abortions” and forced “doctors and hospitals to perform abortions even if it’s against their conscience or beliefs.”
That Harris has an anti-Catholic streak is hardly a secret. In 2018, she thought membership in the Knights of Columbus, a respected Catholic fraternal organization, was somehow relevant to the confirmation of three judicial nominees: Brian Buescher, Paul Matey, and Peter Phipps. She questioned each man about various pro-life statements and commitments by the head of the Knights, and was condemned by her Democratic House colleague Tulsi Gabbard for “fomenting religious bigotry.” Harris also questioned judicial nominee Daniel Collins concerning an amicus brief he had written on behalf of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, my organization, in support of the Little Sisters of the Poor and Hobby Lobby in the HHS Mandate litigation.
As attorney general of California, Harris had filed her own amicus brief with the Supreme Court against Hobby Lobby, on behalf of California and thirteen other states. At stake for the Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby, was not the provision of contraception as such, but the provision of four HHS-mandated drugs and devices that carried FDA labels warning that they could cause early-term abortions. Harris wrote to the Court in favor of denying the Greens religious-liberty protections against this unjust mandate.
Harris has sought to compel pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion. As A.G., she was a cosponsor of California’s Reproductive FACT Act, and she celebrated the governor’s signing it into law. Pro-life pregnancy centers sued Harris over the act’s requirement that they disseminate notices of publicly funded abortion services. After she went to the Senate in 2016, they continued their litigation against her successor, Xavier Becerra, and finally won at the Supreme Court on First Amendment free-speech grounds.
Harris has also targeted pro-life activists. Agents from Harris’s Attorney General’s Office raided the apartment of David Daleiden, seizing hundreds of hours of unreleased undercover videos in which Planned Parenthood officials explicitly admit to selling baby body parts. Daleiden was subsequently charged with fifteen felonies, which led to Planned Parenthood’s suing him in civil court; these legal cases continue, eight years after the initial raid. Meanwhile, Daleiden has sued Harris for colluding with Planned Parenthood to violate his First Amendment rights. My EPPC colleague Alexandra DeSanctis has documented Big Abortion’s war against Daleiden, but ask yourself: When was the last time a left-wing whistleblower or undercover journalist got in trouble with the law? Several Congressional hearings have confirmed Daleiden’s revelations about Planned Parenthood’s selling of baby body parts in violation of state and federal law—and yet Daleiden, not Planned Parenthood, faces legal repercussions.
More could be said, concerning not just Harris’s abortion record, but her anti-Catholicism, her history of religious-liberty violations, and her extreme LGBT activism—from her refusal as A.G. to defend California’s pro-marriage Proposition 8, to her advocacy of taxpayer-funded sex-reassignment surgeries. But there’s a good reason why Harris has received 100-percent ratings from NARAL Pro-Choice America, NARAL Pro-Choice California, and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund.
None of this is to excuse the Republican Party’s watering-down of its own platform’s commitment to the protection of human life. But the lamentable fact that the Republican Party has weakened its commitment to the defense of unborn children should not obscure the fact that the Democratic Party under Harris is as radically pro-abortion as it can possibly be. Short of coming out for killing toddlers, there simply is no way to be more extreme than Kamala Harris and her party now are.
Kamala Harris is a hard-core ideologue—an abortion extremist—and has been since her first days as an elected official. As president, she would be no different.
Ryan T. Anderson is the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and co-author of the book Tearing Us Apart: How Abortion Harms Everything and Solves Nothing.
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