WASHINGTON (AP) — A new series of Kamala Harris campaign ads seeks to highlight the increasingly dangerous medical care for women since the fall of Roe v. Wade by telling the story of a Texas woman who developed a life-threatening infection while that she could not get proper treatment after she had a miscarriage and how she may no longer be able to have children.
In one ad, the woman, identified as Ondrea, describes how excited she was to have a girl, only to discover that the baby would not survive after her waters broke prematurely. She was denied an abortion and eventually went into labor. “Immediately after her birth I was in the worst pain of my life,” she says, as she and her husband stand pictured in her living room next to a framed photo of the baby’s ultrasound. She then developed sepsis, a life-threatening pregnancy complication.
The ad is part of a latest effort by the Democratic nominee to highlight how medical care for pregnant women has become increasingly unstable — including for those who never intended to terminate a pregnancy — since three justices by then-President Donald Trump have been appointed to the Supreme Court. helped overturn abortion rights.
Ondrea blames Trump for her situation.
“It almost cost me my life, and it will affect me for the rest of my life,” she says in the ad.
In another ad aimed at men, Ondrea’s husband Cesar says: “Baby cries at night? I would love to hear that every night. And now we may never get pregnant again.”
“There are rights and freedoms that we have had for generations, but they have simply been taken away from us.”
Harris will campaign on Friday for reproductive health care in Texas, a reliably Republican state that has some of the strictest bans in the country and where women have repeatedly filed lawsuits or spoken out about a dangerous lack of medical care.
When Roe was first overturned, Democrats initially focused on restrictions on abortion access to end unwanted pregnancies. But the same medical procedures used for abortions are used to treat miscarriages. And in fourteen states with strict abortion bans, women are increasingly unable to receive medical care until their condition becomes life-threatening. In some states, physicians can be criminally prosecuted if they provide medical care.
Democrats warn that the winnowing of rights will only continue if Trump is elected. For example, Republican lawmakers in US states have rejected Democrats’ efforts to protect or expand access to contraception.
Democrats hope the issue will motivate people to participate in the nail-biting presidential election and help send Harris to the White House.
About 6 in 10 Americans believe their state should generally allow someone to get a legal abortion if he or she does not want to be pregnant for any reason, according to a July poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Voters in seven states, including some conservative ones, have either protected abortion rights or rejected efforts to restrict them in statewide voting over the past two years.
Trump has been inconsistent in his message to voters on abortion and reproductive rights, continually changing his positions or providing vague, contradictory and sometimes nonsensical answers to questions on an issue that has become a major vulnerability in this year’s election for the Republicans.
In another ad airing Wednesday night on CNN before the Harris town hall, Ondrea stands in front of her bathroom mirror and stares at the huge scar on her stomach. There are photos of her in a hospital bed, her stomach cut open as the captions tell viewers her story. She became pregnant in 2022, but suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks when her waters broke.
Ondrea is black. Black women are at greater risk of preterm labor and other pregnancy complications, and are also much more likely to die during childbirth in the U.S., where maternal mortality is increasing.
The audio contains spliced clips of Trump talking about abortion.
“First of all, I’m the one who eradicated Roe v. Wade,” Trump said.
Moments later, another interviewer asks, “Do you believe in punishment for abortion?”
“There has to be a punishment,” Trump replies.
As the viewer reads about how Ondrea may not be able to have children after her ordeal, they hear Trump’s voice saying, “Women will be happy, confident and free. You will no longer think about abortion.”
