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Vice President Kamala Harris warned that “women will die” if the Supreme Court overturns the precedent on abortion it previously set in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, but pro-life advocates countered that the solution to maternal mortality cannot be the killing of unborn babies.
“I don’t mean to sound alarmist. I mean this: Women will die,” Harris told The San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Sunday.
She made the prediction while discussing the pivotal case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the court is weighing whether all pre-viability restrictions on elective abortion are unconstitutional.
“Women will die,” Harris repeated. “In particular, women who don’t have economic resources and can’t then travel to places or somehow have access to safe reproductive health care, including abortion. And it is not an extreme statement — it is a fact.”
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Harris had previously predicted that women would die if Roe v. Wade gets overturned. She declined to say what the White House will do if the court does overturn Roe.
FILE – In this Nov. 5, 2020, file photo the Supreme Court is seen in Washington. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
Harris’ office did not respond to Fox News’ request for further elaboration. Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and EMILY’s List also did not respond to request for comment.
Pro-life advocates slammed Harris’ prediction in comments to Fox News.
“Vice President Harris’s statement that ‘women will die’ if Roe is overturned relies heavily on the lie that abortion is safe and necessary for women,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, said. “She fails to acknowledge that the United States has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world, while having the most liberal abortion laws in the world.”
Szoch noted that the maternal mortality rate for Black women in Washington, D.C., is 71 deaths per 100,000 births, even though women in D.C. have access to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
“Women are dying because of lack of access to actual health care,” she wrote.
“Pro-abortion doomsday predictions like that from Kamala Harris fall flat in light of Texas’s success in ending nearly all abortions,” Kimberlyn Schwartz, director of media and communication at Texas Right to Life, told Fox News. “We protected pre-born children from 85-90% of abortions since September 1 with the Texas Heartbeat Act and have proven that society does not need abortion.”
(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Melanie Israel, a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, faulted Harris for pitting women against their children.
“We shouldn’t pit women against their children — we should protect them both,” Israel told Fox News. “Abortion isn’t safe. It carries significant risks to women and ends the life of hundreds of thousands of unborn children in America each year.”
Lila Rose, founder and president of Live action, told Fox News that Harris’ “callous disregard for children and their right to be born is a disgrace.”
“The lives of children are just as valuable as the lives of adults, and it should be every politician’s most pressing duty to ensure our laws protect the most vulnerable,” she said. “Instead, Harris wants the law to sanction the greatest human rights abuse and mass slaughter of children our nation has ever seen.”
Alveda King, a pro-life advocate and niece of the late Martin Luther King Jr., insisted that abortion is not “health care” but rather “death care.”
“What Kamala Harris didn’t say: Reportedly, over 60 million babies have died by abortions in America since the killing of babies in the womb became legal with the passage of Roe V Wade in 1973,” King told Fox News. “Added to their deaths are the physical, mental and spiritual trauma many mothers have documented after those abortions. Abortion is death care; not health care. It’s time to end the killing.”
Terrisa Bukovinac, founder and executive director at the Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, told Fox News that “women are already dying from exploitation by the Abortion Industrial Complex.”
Terrisa Bukovinac speaks in front of the Supreme Court.
(Terrisa Bukovinac)
“Big Abortion has ensured that abortion remains unregulated, making in-clinic abortions indistinguishable from so-called ‘back alley’ abortions,” Bukovinac said. “Abortion-vulnerable communities need economic and racial justice to address the root cause of abortion and the abysmal maternal mortality rate, especially for Black women, not the option to terminate the lives of our offspring!”
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“Kamala Harris is purposely regurgitating outdated slogans to ensure campaign funds from the Abortion Industrial Complex,” the progressive pro-life activist added. “Roe v. Wade is a barbaric remnant of white supremacy, and it must be dismantled.”
