EGN NEWS DESK
Ms. Harris desires to enshrine the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal legislation now that the Supreme Court has overturned it.
“When I’m president of the United States, I’ll signal a legislation restoring and defending reproductive freedom in each state,” she wrote in July. To do this, she would wish not simply Democratic majorities in Congress but additionally 50 senators prepared to do away with the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to move most laws.
Ms. Harris mentioned final yr that she and President Biden envisioned a legislation mirroring Roe. As modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected the appropriate to abortion till a fetus may survive outdoors the womb however allowed bans after that time as long as that they had exceptions for medical emergencies. “We’re not attempting to do something that didn’t exist earlier than June of final yr,” she advised CBS News.
As a senator, she was a sponsor of a invoice referred to as the Women’s Health Protection Act that might have gone considerably additional than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, reminiscent of requiring medical doctors to carry out particular assessments or to have hospital admitting privileges as a way to present abortions. She reiterated her help for it in 2022.
She additionally argued, whereas operating for president in 2019, that states with a historical past of proscribing abortion rights in violation of Roe needs to be topic to “pre-clearance” for brand new abortion legal guidelines, which means these legal guidelines must be federally permitted earlier than they might take impact. Her marketing campaign didn’t reply to a request to verify whether or not she would nonetheless help this if Congress codified Roe. (Without such codification, the proposal is moot.)
In the absence of congressional majorities able to codifying Roe, Mr. Biden’s cupboard took administrative actions to attempt to restrict the consequences of state abortion bans, and Ms. Harris has indicated help for these actions.
The Department of Health and Human Services advised hospitals in 2022 {that a} legislation pertaining to emergency rooms, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, obligates medical doctors to carry out an abortion in the event that they consider it’s wanted to stabilize a affected person. (That steering is topic to authorized challenges on which the Supreme Court has to this point declined to rule.) In April, the identical division introduced a rule to protect many abortion sufferers’ medical data from investigators and prosecutors.
