On one key issue Kamala Harris has Trump beaten hands down

Whatever her shortcomings, the vice president is impressive on the subject of abortion. And the electorate are on her side

“Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” This was the question Kamala Harris asked Brett Kavanaugh at the Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing in 2018. Kavanaugh was Trump’s pick, a conservative, to sit on the Supreme Court. This Supreme Court was to overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark case that recognised women’s constitutional right to abortion. 
Kavanaugh wavered. “Uh, I’m happy to answer a more specific question but…” then he trailed off. Trump, who had years earlier (in 2011) donated to Harris’s campaign, called her questioning “nasty”.
Now that Biden has gone and the tributes flow in about his “selflessness”, when in fact for the good of his party his clinging on looks the very opposite, the anointing of Harris by Democrat Party donors already appears a done deal. But, given the tumult of this last week in American politics, who can be certain of anything? The only thing I am certain of is that we are a very different country to America.
Young women in America now have fewer rights than their mothers, which is shocking. In June 2022, when Roe v Wade was overturned, regulation of abortion was returned to individual states. As a result, 14 states have banned abortion in almost all circumstances and 10 have imposed restrictions that often end up being overturned by the courts. 
One in three American women of reproductive age lives in a state with bans or restrictions. Yet at least a quarter of women in the US will have had an abortion by the age of 45. In poll after poll around two thirds of Americans support a woman’s right to choose.
The question, then, is whether this will be an electoral issue? If it is, Harris is in a good place to fight it. Whatever her shortcomings have been, she is impressive on “reproductive rights” – the phrase Biden has always preferred because, as a Catholic, he has clearly found this issue problematic. 
Yet, after the overturning of Roe v Wade, the number of women registering to vote rose by 35 per cent in 10 states. In polls, a fifth of registered voters (mostly Democrats and Independents) said they would not compromise on this issue. This has been borne out.
It was partly fury over the loss of abortion rights that stopped the expected Republican “red wave” in the 2022 midterms. In 2023, the same issue was said to be behind the Democrats’ victory in elections in Virginia. Voters were in favour of reproductive rights in referendums across red states such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio.
The Democrats’ strategy included emotive attack ads, as the anti-abortionists had done for years, telling the stories of a woman in Texas who had to leave the state after finding out that the foetus she was carrying could never survive, and a 12-year-old girl raped by a member of her own family unable to access termination.
It should never be forgotten that it was a conservative minority that pushed through this legislation, and their actual goal is to ban all contraception. They succeeded in part because of the complacency of a Democratic establishment. We have seen a lot of that again lately.
The fêted Ruth Bader Ginsburg would not retire when Obama was president, which meant that when she died she could be replaced by a conservative judge. While non-profit organisation Planned Parenthood got hooked into divisive rows on race, Medicare and trans politics, evangelicals were coming together with Catholics and occasionally big tech (who have access to abortion data) to take away a woman’s right to choose. 
The Democrats who cannot define womanhood, and that includes Harris, will have to pick their way through this. There is no such thing as a gender-neutral abortion, but it is Trump who is now on the back foot on this issue. 
As ever, he has no core belief except in what wins. At times he has described himself as a moderate, but is now playing to his Christian base. 
In choosing the Ohio senator JD Vance as a running mate, though, he is boxed in. Vance is against all abortion in all circumstances, including rape and incest. That these dubious men should legislate over the rights of women disgusts me. Women’s bodily autonomy is not something that should have ever been a partisan issue. 
The anti-abortion lobby cleverly embraced a civil rights discourse, insisting that the right to life of a six-week-old foetus is equal to the right to life of the woman carrying it. To those that are opposed to abortion, I say: “Fine, don’t have one – but why would you take this right away from others?”
Harris watched the reversal of Roe v Wade from Airforce Two and wrote a speech in which she spoke of freedom, healthcare, women’s right to privacy, and “the right for each person to make intimate decisions about our heart and home”. She linked this right to other rights that America thought were settled, such as inter-racial marriage. She spoke of America’s aspiration as being “to expand freedom”.
Whether she will become the Democratic nominee and whether suburban women can be mobilised remains to be seen. As ever, though, women’s rights are not a marginal issue. Indeed, they may be key if America is to stop going backwards.