President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will rally voters in Virginia on Tuesday, seeking to emphasize the stakes for reproductive rights in 2024 – the first presidential election since the Supreme Court overturned the federal constitutional right to an abortion.
It’s the first time the president and vice president will have hit the trail together during 2024.
At the rally, which comes one day after what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the president, vice president and their spouses will “underscore what is at stake for reproductive freedom in 2024 — including the threat of a MAGA Republican-led national abortion ban — and President Biden’s commitment to codifying the protections of Roe into law,” according to a campaign announcement.
The president, according to a campaign official, will be introduced by Amanda Zurawski, a Texas woman who said she nearly died after being denied an abortion in her state.
The Biden campaign is banking on abortion rights being one of the pivotal issues driving voters out against the GOP nominee in November. Nearly two-thirds of Americans polled after the 2022 decision that overturned Roe said they disagreed with the decision, according to a CNN Poll conducted by SSRS in the decision’s aftermath.
Biden’s campaign has also been homing in on recent comments made by former President Donald Trump taking credit for the decision that overturned Roe. The former president faces a crucial night Tuesday in New Hampshire in his two-person race against Nikki Haley for the Republican nomination.
Harris, the administration’s point person on abortion rights, kicked off a “reproductive freedoms tour” this week with a Monday stop in Wisconsin. She is expected to travel “across the country” to hold a number of events bringing together “thousands of people,” her office previously said.
“Freedom is not to be given,” Harris said in Wisconsin on Monday, speaking to hundreds of attendees, most of whom were women. “It is not to be bestowed. It is ours by right, and that includes the freedom to make decisions about one’s own body without anyone telling you what to do.”
Referencing the three conservative justices Trump placed on the Supreme Court, likely tilting the balance that would eventually eliminate Roe, Harris said the former president intended “for them to take your freedom, and it is a decision he bragged about a couple of weeks ago.”
She echoed those thoughts in an exclusive interview with CNN’s Laura Coates on Monday.
“By inference, he is proud that women have been deprived of fundamental freedoms to make decisions about their own body; by inference, proud that doctors are being penalized and criminalized for providing health care, proud that women are silently suffering because they don’t have access to the health care they need,” Harris said. “So, let’s understand that the stakes are so very high.”
The campaign began hitting the airwaves in battleground states this week with ads featuring emotional testimony from a Texas woman who had to travel out of state to seek an abortion because of a state law banning abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.
“Donald Trump is the reason that more than 1 in 3 American women of reproductive age don’t have the freedom to make their own health care decisions. Now, he and MAGA Republicans are running to go even further if they retake the White House,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, the Biden campaign manager. “In 2024, a vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a vote to restore Roe, and a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to ban abortion across the country.”
CNN’s MJ Lee, Arlette Saenz and Nikki Carvajal contributed to this report.
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