WASHINGTON — One month before Election Day, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Austin on Saturday and, calling Texas’ abortion ban “immoral,” urged voters to install prosecutors and state officials who will not try to imprison abortion providers.
“There’s an election in 31 days, and it will matter,” she said. “It’s going to matter who your county prosecutor is if you live in a place where there’s a state law that has criminalized doctors and nurses and health care providers. It’s going to matter who your attorney general is” and “who your governor is.”
The Texas ban, imposed after the Supreme Court ended a half-century of constitutional protection for abortion access in June, includes no exception in cases of pregnancies resulting from incest or rape.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, seeking a third term against Democratic civil rights lawyer Rochelle Garza, has fiercely defended the state’s ban and other restrictions, including a century-old ban the state dusted off after Roe vs. Wade fell, and a novel law that lets legal bounty hunters sue doctors or anyone else who helps a woman obtain an abortion after about six weeks.
Although the GOP-controlled Legislature has been at the vanguard of curbing abortion in Texas, locally elected district attorneys would enforce the ban, which carries up to life in prison and fines of at least $100,000 for performing an abortion. Dallas County prosecutor John Creuzot, a Democrat, has vowed not to enforce that law. Counterparts in neighboring Tarrant and Denton counties would. The prosecutor in Harris County, the state’s most populous, has called enforcement impractical and a low priority.
Harris spoke to about 140 people at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, mostly University of Texas students.
She recounted a conversation in which her 17-year-old goddaughter told her that she and her friends are scrutinizing state abortion laws as they narrow their own college options.
“That’s real,” Harris said, taking aim at restrictions enacted just a few blocks away at the Texas Capitol and signed by Gov. Greg Abbott.
Consider, she said, what it means to have a ban that doesn’t even allow abortion in cases of rape or incest.
“The idea that there would be a policy and an approach that would say to someone who has survived an extreme act of violence and violation … [that] you do not have the autonomy, the authority as it relates to your body that has just withstood that act to make a decision about what happens to your body next, is immoral.
“It’s truly immoral,” Harris said. “The government shouldn’t be making this decision for her. It is absolutely about freedom. It is about liberty.”
The issue of migrants did not come up during the 40-minute conversation.
At least twice in the past week, buses delivered dozens of migrants from Texas to Washington, dropping them off outside the gates of the Naval Observatory — the official residence of the vice president.
Abbott began sending migrants by the busload to the nation’s capital in mid-April, saying he wanted to share the burden borne by Texas communities and force the attention of federal officials.
Since then, thousands of migrants who arrived in the country illegally have been driven from Texas border cities to Washington, New York and Chicago, all Democratic strongholds.
Ahead of Harris’ trip to Austin on Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn and other Texas Republicans called on her to visit the border, too, hammering a point they’ve made for months that the Biden-Harris administration caused and then neglected the worst migration crisis in six decades.
“Texans have been forced to bear the consequences of this administration’s failure to address the border crisis, including the historic number of illegal crossings as well as the tragic rise in migrant deaths, drug smuggling, fentanyl overdoses, and cartel violence,” Cornyn said. “Unfortunately, the administration’s Border Czar hasn’t seen the epicenter of their self-inflicted crisis firsthand, which has overwhelmed our border communities and law enforcement. Instead of using our state as an ATM and leaving as fast as possible, the Vice President should go to the border and meet with Texans to understand the very real costs of her inaction.”
Harris’ only border visit as vice president was in June 2021, when she visited El Paso under pressure from Republicans who had taunted her for months as a “border czar” who had yet to visit the U.S.-Mexico frontier.
Biden never designated Harris as his “border czar,” though he did assign her to handle matters related to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, major sources of a migrant surge last year. Adversaries quickly conflated that with responsibility for immigration policy and border security.
Mini Timmaraju, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America and a former Houston-area Planned Parenthood official, introducing Harris at the LBJ Library, said “the fight for our fundamental rights, including the right to abortion and contraception, has never been more urgent in the wake of the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade. 14 states and counting are enforcing extreme or total bans on abortion. And we know these anti-choice extremists won’t stop.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently introduced such a bill, to ban abortion nationwide after 15 weeks, with exceptions for pregnancies resulting from incest or rape.
Most Texas Republicans in Congress have supported a nationwide ban. Most have distanced themselves from that position since the Supreme Court overturned Roe in June, but Democrats warn they will end up following Graham’s advice to impose such a ban if they retake control of Congress.
After the conversation the LBJ Library, Harris spoke at a Texas Democratic Party fundraising dinner, where she reiterated the administration’s commitment to abortion rights and urged voters to support Abbott’s challenger: “Elect Beto O’Rourke as your next governor.”
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