Kamala Harris just did something unprecedented on the campaign trail

Kamala Harris is a historic candidate for so many reasons. But on a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, Georgia, she did something unprecedented. She dared to discuss the real reason so many people get abortions.

@auntiekilljoy

I’ve been thinking about this moment all weekend and wrote a column about it at the newsletter. Just incredible #abortioneveryday #politics #feminism #fyp #kamala #kamalaharris #prochoice

♬ original sound – Jessica Valenti

Feminist writer Jessica Valenti brought this to light in a recent TikTok where she put Harris’s Friday speech into context.

“Kamala Harris did something on Friday that no other Presidential candidate has done before,” Valenti explains. She then shows a clip of Harris’s speech where the candidate discusses a case in which a woman died due to not being able to access a legal, safe abortion.

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Harris starts out by telling her audience to speak the name of the victim: Amber Nicole Thurman. Thurman was a young Black woman who died under easily preventable circumstances caused in part by the state’s abortion ban.

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“She had her future all planned out,” Harris said of Thurman. “She had her plan, what she wanted to do. For her son. For herself. For their future. And so when she discovered she was pregnant, she decided she wanted to have an abortion.”

It’s subtle, as Valenti points out, but it’s right there in the speech: the word “wanted.”

“Do you see what she did there?” Valenti continues. “She talks about abortion as a normal part of someone’s life.”

Valenti goes on to explain that when pro-life politicians, and even some pro-choice advocates, talk about abortion, they usually focus on stories about wanted pregnancies that have become dangerous, or nonconsensual pregnancies. This is the first time a political candidate has chosen to tell the story of someone who chose to have an abortion because it wasn’t the right thing for her.

It seems insane to think that this hasn’t happened before, and perhaps doubly insane to realize that Roe ended up being overturned before this moment. But make no mistake: this is huge. The right to abortion matters in every single case. Whatever the circumstances of a pregnancy, it should always be an option to safely, legally terminate that pregnancy. We shouldn’t have to jump through perceived moral hoops to justify something that should be every person’s right.

“The vast majority of abortions,” Valenti explains, “are just…somebody didn’t want to be pregnant at that moment. It’s not what they had planned for themselves.”

Period! Those stories deserve to be told, and perhaps now more than ever, they need to be told.

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