CALIFORNIA, USA — At a fundraiser in San Francisco last week, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke bluntly about the future of reproductive rights: California is not immune to a national abortion ban, she said.
“The stakes are high,” Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, said to a cheering crowd at the Fairmont Hotel that included Gov. Gavin Newsom and other high-profile Democrats. She continued the theme this week at the Democratic National Convention, where delegates have stressed their fears that reproductive rights could be curtailed nationwide.
As the Democratic nominee, Harris has made abortion and reproductive rights a central issue in the presidential race. Political strategists and pollsters say it’s a winning issue for Democrats, with the majority of the American public supportive of abortion to some degree even as nearly two dozen states have passed abortion bans since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and ended federal abortion protections.
Where did Harris’ full-throated support for abortion rights come from? According to colleagues, friends and Harris’ public record, it’s anything but new.
She built a reputation in California as a prosecutor who backed abortion rights, and, as attorney general, Harris threw her weight behind multiple abortion issues with national consequences. Two standouts include investigating claims that Planned Parenthood sold fetal remains and supporting regulation of anti-abortion pregnancy centers.
“As long as I have known her, this has always been a core issue,” said San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu. Chiu is a former Democratic assemblymember who has known Harris for more than 20 years and worked with her on multiple statewide campaigns opposing ballot measures that would have required doctors to tell parents before performing an abortion on a minor.
That record gives her credibility to her platform on reproductive rights, but it also makes her a target among anti-abortion groups who stamp Harris as an extremist.
“The party that called for abortions to be ‘safe, legal and rare’ is long gone,” said Marjorie Dannefelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, in a press release on the Democratic National Convention’s 2024 platform. “They ignore the majority of women facing unplanned pregnancy who want real solutions to keep their children, not more pressure to abort. And they lack the courage to tell the truth about their agenda to go even further than Roe by passing a national all-trimester abortion mandate.”
Investigating anti-abortion group
As attorney general, Harris’ first foray into the highly charged national abortion debate came in April 2016 when investigators from the California Department of Justice raided the home of anti-abortion activist David Daleiden, seizing a laptop and hard drives.
Nine months prior, Daleiden posted videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood executives engaging in the illegal sale of fetal remains. The videos showed covertly filmed conversations of Planned Parenthood executives discussing abortion procedures and how tissue is collected and exchanged with research companies. At least 13 state investigations, including those initiated by Republican lawmakers, have since debunked the claims made by Daleiden in the videos.
Donating fetal tissue to researchers and recouping expenses is legal under U.S. law and states may impose additional regulations.
But at the time the videos set off a firestorm of outrage across the country. They’re circulating again on social media this election cycle.
Conservatives characterized Harris’ investigation into Daleiden as a political inquisition. Anti-abortion groups protested the raid, and some California Republicans called on Harris to investigate Planned Parenthood instead of Daleiden.
She made no public remarks about Daleiden.
“Harris never held a press conference. She didn’t do that,” said Dan Morain, a former CalMatters editor who wrote a biography of the vice president called “Kamala’s Way, An American Life.” “She was doing what prosecutors need to do, (which) is not try the case in public.”
The evidence gathered by Harris’ justice department laid the groundwork for 15 felony charges later filed by then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra against Daleiden and his counterpart Sandra Merritt, alleging they recorded conversations without consent in violation of state law.
At the time, Daleiden called the charges “bogus.” He has maintained he was exercising his First Amendment rights when he recorded conversations with Planned Parenthood leaders, and that the recordings were obtained legitimately in public places.
“Instead of prosecuting the persons and organizations caught on tape (of) commercially exploiting fetal tissue transfers, the Attorney General instead targeted Daleiden and Merritt,” court documents filed by Daleiden’s attorney state.
Kathy Kneer, who was chief executive of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, refuted the idea that Harris granted the organization “any special favors.” Instead, the organization was required to supply investigators with reams of documentation, she said.
“They really held our feet to the fire and did everything within the letter of the law,” Kneer said.
Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California declined to be interviewed for this story. The organization has endorsed Harris.
The criminal case against Daleiden is ongoing with a jury trial scheduled for December. The state Supreme Court most recently rejected an appeal from Daleiden and Merritt in 2023, allowing the jury trial to move forward. In 2019, a civil jury ruled against Daleiden and awarded Planned Parenthood $2.2 million in damages, which the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed by dismissing Daleiden’s federal appeal in 2023.
Backed California law regulating pregnancy centers
Around the same time, Harris sponsored a bill in the Legislature to regulate crisis pregnancy centers. It was a relatively risky move, some say, which would end up backfiring when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with anti-abortion groups and overturned the law.
“She stuck her neck out on that one by sponsoring the bill,” Morain said. “It’s quite apparent that it wasn’t necessarily going to be the case that it was deemed constitutional.”
The legislation — simple on its face — required crisis pregnancy centers to post a notification stating that comprehensive family planning services including contraception and abortion were available through state public programs.
Crisis pregnancy centers are often religiously affiliated organizations that aim to prevent women from getting abortions. They may offer free diapers, parenting classes and other social services, but abortion rights advocates also accuse them of misleading women about the dangers of abortion and contraception — an accusation that many centers deny.
Center owners and those in the pro-life movement vehemently opposed the law, stating that the government was forcing them to advertise something with which they fundamentally disagreed.
“It was not right, not fair and clearly unconstitutional,” said Thomas Glessner, president of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, a legal organization with about 155 member pregnancy centers in California.
Almost as soon as then-Gov. Jerry Brown signed the requirement into law, the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates filed a lawsuit to stop it.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the law on First Amendment grounds. Since then, lawmakers across the country have struggled to regulate pregnancy centers. There are at least 176 pregnancy centers in California, according to a 2023 CalMatters analysis.
“We won the case and it was hailed by a lot of free speech advocates as…the most significant free speech case in a generation,” Glessner said.
Though the law was struck down, supporters don’t necessarily see it as a strike against Harris’ record. Chiu, who co-authored the bill, said he believes the law was narrowly tailored and would have been upheld if former President Donald Trump had not appointed three Supreme Court justices during his term.
Abortion on the ballot after Roe
Harris’ public messaging on abortion has been remarkably consistent throughout her career. She has repeatedly credited her work as a local prosecutor specializing in sex crimes against women and children for her condemnation of total and near total abortion bans that make no exceptions for rape or incest.
“The idea that states would be passing laws that would take from an individual their right to self determination after they have endured such an atrocious act of violence is unconscionable,” Harris said during a reproductive rights forum with California lawmakers in 2022.
On the campaign trail, Republican presidential nominee Trump has said he would not sign a national ban and pushed the Republican National Committee to adopt a softer stance that hints at, but doesn’t outright acknowledge, fetal personhood. He has taken credit for the Supreme Court repealing Roe v. Wade, and said the issue should be settled by individual states.
Republicans “backed away from clarity,” said Mary Ruth Ziegler, an abortion historian and legal scholar from UC Davis School of Law, on the updated Republican platform. “The platform is very confusing, and I think that’s on purpose because it’s designed to appeal to people with a wide variety of positions on abortion.”
It’s an unsurprising, calculated move, said Mike Madrid, a long-time California GOP strategist and Trump opponent, because abortion is a losing issue for Republicans. It’s Harris’ strongest issue, he said.
“As long as you’re focused on an issue that is not your strength, you either do a complete 180 on it or you’re going to suffer on the polls,” Madrid said.
Ziegler also said the type of outrage Daleiden and his organization Center for Medical Progress tried to stoke 10 years ago with his undercover videos may have less impact on today’s voter in part because states have actually banned abortion.
“The strategies that might have worked to paint supporters of abortion rights as extremists don’t seem to be as effective in a world where, you know, almost half the country has some kind of ban,” Ziegler said.
San Diego Democratic state State Sen. Toni Atkins, who ran two reproductive health clinics before seeking public office, called Harris “the loudest and most visible and most prominent voice on reproductive freedom.”
That visibility has included her visiting a Planned Parenthood clinic earlier this year, the first vice president to do so. But because of her long-running support, pro-life advocates like Glessner see a Harris presidency as a threat.
“We immediately sent out an invitation for her to visit a pro-life pregnancy center…and of course never got a response,” Glessner said. “Why don’t you come and see who you’re criticizing and give us a fair shake.”
The Harris campaign did not respond to several interview requests for this story.
This article was originally published by CalMatters.
