Now Is the Time for Kamala Harris to Flip the Script and Win Big on Abortion

Something unexpected happened to me while I was watching the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. I was sitting in my pajamas listening to Hillary Clinton’s speech when I started sobbing. Did Hillary Clinton just make me cry? I thought, horrified, afraid I might be having a sudden-onset midlife crisis. This was the woman I had protested in college over her support for the Iraq War. In 2016, I was a Bernie girl, and today, in 2024, I’m so outraged over Democrats’ support for the Israeli war on Gaza that I expected to watch the entire convention with my jaw clenched. But then Clinton invoked the legacy of Shirley Chishom. “In 1972, a fearless Black congresswoman named Shirley Chisholm, she ran for president, and her determination let me and millions of others dream bigger,” Clinton said. “Not just because of who she was, but because of who she fought for: working parents, poor children, the last, the least, and the lost.” Suddenly, I could see a portal between Chisholm’s “unbought and unbossed” feminism and this moment, and it dawned on me that the fall of Roe v. Wade had cracked that portal open.

Clinton continued: “I wish my mother and Kamala’s mother could see us. They would say, ‘Keep going.’ Shirley and Gerry [Ferraro] would say, ‘Keep going.’ Women fighting for reproductive healthcare are saying, ‘Keep going.’ Families building better lives, parents stretching to afford childcare, young people struggling to pay their rent—they’re all asking us to keep going.”

Was this it? I wondered, wiping tears onto my pajama top—was this the moment when the Democratic Party finally acknowledged low-income women of color as its foundation? Was the party finally going to talk about how economic and racial justice are intertwined with abortion rights? It was so refreshing to hear Clinton talk about reproductive healthcare and “parents stretching to afford childcare” in the same breath. So often, abortion has been siloed off as a “hot-button social issue,” even though that’s not how people experience it in real life. That framing has granted Republicans an escape hatch, allowing them to avoid the glaring contradiction at the heart of their agenda—that they force people, especially poor women of color, to continue pregnancies against their will, while pushing economic policies that make it harder to raise children. Democrats have a chance now to flip the script—to become the party that wants to grant you the freedom to terminate a pregnancy and the freedom to raise the children you want. They can do so by offering economic policies like universal health care, affordable childcare, paid family leave, access to safe housing and nutritious food—and by tying these economic policies back to the issue of reproductive freedom. Most people make decisions about their pregnancies based at least in part on their financial circumstances, which means abortion is inextricable from economic policies like these. What if Kamala Harris wove all these tendrils together, creating a Reproductive Justice New Deal for 2024?

For decades, Republicans have used abortion as a wedge—a way to divide Democratic voters and funnel Catholics and evangelicals into their party. Now, with abortion at the center of the Democratic National Convention thanks to the fall of Roe, I caught a glimpse of a future where Democrats use abortion as a different kind of wedge—one that cracks open the door to a more progressive agenda not just on “social issues” but on economic issues too. Clinton sounded so close. And her words affected me more because they were coming not from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who gave her own barnburner of a speech earlier in the night, but from someone who, at least earlier in her career, had represented the worst conciliations of the Democratic Party on abortion and welfare. Today, thanks in part to the reforms of the Bill Clinton era, welfare is in tatters. Most parents are struggling to afford childcare, and we lack the right to paid parental leave that is a given in almost every other country. Decisions about unplanned pregnancies are inextricable from these policy failures. Yet Democrats almost always talk about abortion as separate from bread-and-butter economic issues—as a matter of privacy, like an embarrassing family secret.

This year, after abortion won seven ballot referenda in a row, Democrats have finally caught on to the fact that abortion is a winning issue—but if they continue to talk about it in isolation from the rest of working people’s lives, they will miss the opportunity to energize their base with a message that meets this moment. After all, progressive economic policies like affordable childcare and Medicare for All are popular, just like abortion, as a recent poll commissioned by the campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders shows. As Ocasio-Cortez put it in a social-media post: “Abortion rights are a class struggle too. When the powerful force people to give birth against their will, they trap millions into cycles of economic setback and desperation. Especially in a country without guaranteed healthcare.”

What if Kamala Harris embraced a message like this one on Thursday, tying a promise of universal healthcare, child tax credits, and affordable daycare to reproductive freedom? She could use a framework that already exists—the one outlined by Black women who gathered on the sidelines of a conference in 1994 after the Clinton administration announced that it would exclude reproductive health care from its health care reform plan. Outraged, the women set out a framework that defined reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”

This is the kind of bold, winning framework that could energize the Democratic base. But for Harris to embrace it would be major departure from DNC history—to say the least.

In 1992, Bill Clinton strode onto the stage at the Democratic National Convention, just a few weeks after the Supreme Court had opened the flood gates to steep abortion restrictions with its decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Listen. Here me now,” Clinton declared. “I am not pro-abortion; I am pro-choice, strongly. I believe this difficult and painful decision should be left to the women of America. I hope the right to privacy can be protected and we will never again have to discuss this issue on political platforms.” He went on, “I am old enough to remember what it was like before Roe v. Wade, and I do not want to return to the time when we made criminals of women and their doctors.” As we all now know, this way of treating abortion as a private issue and stigmatizing those who have them has failed to prevent the very criminalization he feared. It has also obscured the wider economic context in which this decision is often made—one that depends, in large part, not just on private thoughts but on public policy.

By 1996, Clinton had settled on the language that would define the Democratic position in the 1990s, declaring at the convention that year that “abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” His comments were even more galling because exactly one week earlier, Clinton had signed legislation to “end welfare as we know it,” converting direct payments to families into block grants for states and thereby ensuring that more working-class people were going to struggle to afford the families they had or wanted.

Two decades later, when Hillary Clinton accepted the Democratic nomination, she was cursory in her mention of abortion: “If you believe we should expand Social Security and protect a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions…join us,” she declared, adding a mention of “women’s rights” later in the speech. She wasn’t alone in glossing over the issue. In 2020, neither Biden nor Harris mentioned abortion in their remarks at the DNC—although Harris made a reference to “injustice in reproductive and maternal health care.” At the Republican National Convention, Trump, on the other hand, launched into a fantastical monologue on “extreme late-term abortion” and how Democrats “have no problem with stopping a baby’s beating heart in the ninth month of pregnancy.” It was clear which party was prioritizing the issue that year—and Republicans’ single-minded pursuit of overturning Roe v. Wade paid off two years later.