A diverse, women-driven Roe coalition is working to defeat the man they hold responsible and elect Kamala Harris, brought together by the end of federal abortion rights and concerns about democracy.
This article was originally published by The 19th.
A former school board member in Michigan spent the final weeks before the election sitting around the kitchen table with her daughters, calling voters to ask them to back abortion rights, because as a nurse midwife and a mother she is terrified.
A grandmother in Arizona whose top issue is abortion—one many years ago saved her life—left the Republican Party in 2020, then campaigned vigorously this year for a ballot measure to protect the procedure in a state where it’s currently banned after 15 weeks.
A woman in Pennsylvania who runs an organization supporting crime victims and who has voted for candidates from both parties said that when she casts her ballot this year, she would be thinking about saving her two adult daughters’ reproductive rights.
Americans are picking their first president after the Supreme Court overturned their constitutional right to an abortion, which was guaranteed for nearly 50 years by Roe v. Wade. The decision landed just months before the 2022 midterm elections. A tumult of Republican abortion bans snapped into place. Democratic-led states rushed to pass protective abortion laws and abortion rights advocates scrambled to put the issue directly before citizens.
Now, two-and-a-half years later, with near-full abortion bans in 13 states, deaths confirmed because of them, and a smattering of states that have enacted protections via the direct democracy of ballot initiatives, the country has a choice: to reelect Republican Donald Trump, whose pledge to undo Roe helped fuel his first ascent to the White House; or to elect Democrat Kamala Harris, who is running on resurrecting abortion rights as she aims to be the first woman to win the presidency.
The nurse, the grandmother and the victims’ advocate do not represent every woman, but they do represent the majority of U.S. women, who support legal abortion at higher rates than men. They have been building a coalition to defeat Trump across lines of age, race, class, education, sexuality, identity and political ideology. In their final push, they’ve expanded their appeal to men, asking them to help stop the former president, either because they believe he took away an essential right, because they believe he will rule as an authoritarian, or because they believe both.
After the Supreme Court overturned Roe in its June 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the country is in the early stages of finding out how the undoing of 1973 landmark ruling, which coincided with the sexual revolution, will impact the lives of Americans.
Roe’s author, Justice Harry Blackmun, told the New York Times that establishing the right to an abortion was “a step that had to be taken as we go down the road toward the full emancipation of women.” After the ruling, deaths related to pregnancy and childbirth plummeted, women’s participation in the workforce went up, women started enrolling in college and graduating at higher rates than men, and the average age of marriage increased by nearly a decade.
Kathy Bedikian, 61, the nurse midwife and former school board member, came to a Harris field office in Trenton, Mich., on a recent Friday afternoon to stuff envelopes. Her two adult daughters, one of whom works for a reproductive justice organization, went door knocking an hour or so away in the college town of Ann Arbor. Bedikian said it activated something within her when Michiganders in 2022, just months after Dobbs, passed a citizen-offered amendment to protect abortion rights in their state constitution, overturning a 1931 ban.
Though Bedikian knows that abortion access is protected in Michigan, for now, she also knows from working in obstetrics and gynecology that there are many ways for a president to cut off access to abortion nationwide. She knows that Michigan is an important battleground state, so she and her daughters are all in on Harris’ candidacy.
“I’m terrified,” Bedikian told The 19th, ticking off abortion, the economy and gun violence as her top concerns, “about what is going to happen to women if Donald Trump is elected.”
Bedikian is among the 24 percent of women voters who cite abortion as the single issue that is most important to their vote, compared with just 6 percent of men, according to New York Times/Siena College polling from late October.
For women, abortion is now the most important issue, tied with the economy. Six in 10 trust Harris more than Trump on abortion, and a smaller percentage of women trust Trump on the issue than any other. That includes the economy and immigration, on which the former president has been heavily relying as a motivator, including with women, as he closes out his campaign.
“I’ll tell you what I’m not worried about: immigration,” Bedikian added.
“No Regrets”
On one side of the presidential race is Trump, a white man who nominated three of the conservative justices who overturned Roe. He faces at least two criminal cases related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; he has been found liable for sexual abuse, defamation and fraud; and he has been convicted of 34 felonies related to falsifying business records to obscure payments to an adult film star. His greatest achievements as president are a 2017 tax overhaul that largely benefitted businesses and the wealthy and cementing the conservative majority on the high court.
On the other side is Harris, a Black and South Asian American woman who is a former U.S. senator, state attorney general and prosecutor of sexual abuse cases. She is serving as the first woman vice president in the nation’s history and spearheaded President Joe Biden’s efforts to protect reproductive health after the Dobbs ruling.
Their visions for reproductive health present a stark contrast.
Trump has offered no coherent plan for how he would approach reproductive healthcare or rights. He has repeatedly said that “everybody” wanted Dobbs so the issue of abortion could return to the states and that he has “no regrets” about overturning Roe. In reality, 57 percent of U.S. adults disapproved of Dobbs when it was decided; among women that figure was 62 percent, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. Support for legal abortion access has gone up in the two years since: Majorities of men (60 percent) and women (69 percent) now say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to SurveyMonkey polling done for The 19th.
There are 13 states with near-total abortion bans and six more that cut off access at six weeks, before many people know they are pregnant. Other than maintaining his position that abortion regulation is best left up to the states, which would preserve this status quo, Trump has said little that is cogent about how his administration would approach reproductive healthcare.
Much of the 2024 debate related to abortion has revolved around the political red herring that the next president might have the chance to sign or veto federal legislation. It is highly likely that the government will be divided in Washington—and that neither party will be in the position to clear or change the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule that is all but sure to prevent such legislation from passing.
Here is what we know about Trump and reproductive healthcare: He has said he would veto a national abortion ban. He has praised a Republican Party policy platform that supports states granting 14th Amendment rights to fetuses—a path to fetal personhood, which nearly all experts agree imperils access to in vitro fertilization, as well as abortion. He nevertheless declared himself the “father of IVF,” and promised voters that the government or employers would pay for the procedure, without offering specifics. He said that he was “looking at” restrictions on contraception, then said it was not true, but never followed up with details. He teased an announcement on the abortion drug mifepristone that never came. He often repeats the abortion lie that Democrats want to kill babies after they are born.
Since Trump did not release his own policies, Project 2025, a blueprint for a second Trump term offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation, remains the most detailed insight into how his administration might handle reproductive healthcare. Though Trump has tried to distance himself, hundreds of the project’s contributors have direct ties to his past administration, campaigns or transition efforts.
Project 2025 recommends, among other things, reversing the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of the abortion drug mifepristone and encouraging the Justice Department to enforce the dormant 1873 Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of obscene materials, including articles intended for “producing abortion.” It also envisions a federal government that denies the existence of LGBTQ+ people and equates the act of being transgender with pornography, suggesting forceful steps to end gender-affirming healthcare.
Here is what we know about Harris and reproductive healthcare: The vice president has said she would sign federal abortion protections. She has been a champion of a reproductive healthcare task force created by Biden that seeks to improve access to contraception; protect mifepristone in court; and educate the public about their right to receive emergency medical treatment that includes abortions. The Biden-Harris Justice Department has a task force of its own working to protect reproductive healthcare, handling cases related to accessing clinics and defending emergency healthcare laws. She supported legislation that protects people from discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.
“Tremendous Amount of Voter Confusion”
Roughly a third of the Senate is up this year and all 435 House seats are on ballots. Future congressional control will hinge on whether Democrats can hold onto Senate seats in states like Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, which are also presidential battlegrounds, along with a couple of dozen competitive House races clustered in places like suburban Pennsylvania and Southern California.
Democrats currently have a one-seat majority in the Senate and Republicans have a slim majority in the House. Democrats have attempted to codify Roe, pass legislation to protect IVF, repeal the Comstock Act and shore up access to contraception. Republicans have blocked their efforts, arguing they are unnecessary or too expansive.
Many GOP candidates on the campaign trail have tried to recast their records on reproductive rights; Republicans in some of the most competitive Senate races have criticized women for their focus on abortion.
Kelly Hall, executive director of the Fairness Project, which works on progressive-leaning ballot measure campaigns, said many Americans don’t know the recent history of the post-Roe era—nearly one in five voters in battleground states erroneously believe Biden is responsible for ending Roe, according to a New York Times/Siena College survey.
There is “still a tremendous amount of voter confusion about what the real threat to abortion access really is, who is responsible for the fall of Roe, and what they can do about it—and that is being exacerbated by abortion opponents now figuring out that voters are not with them on this issue when they plainly understand it, so they are working very hard to sow confusion for voters,” Hall said.
Ten states have ballot measures to protect abortion and other reproductive rights. The Fairness Project is working on abortion initiatives in Arizona, Florida, Missouri, Montana and Nebraska. Hall said she sees a path to victory in all of them, but pointed to Florida as the most challenging, given the state’s higher threshold for passage and unprecedented pushback from the administration of GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Susan Kolbe, the grandmother in Arizona whose abortion saved her life, started attending abortion rights events over the summer. Her involvement in the effort followed switching her party registration in 2020 after deciding the GOP had “gone off the rails.” She now balances her political activism with her responsibilities on the family’s small ranch.
“I had to have three rounds of emergency medical care, and that allowed me to live and go on and have two more children and then become a grandmother, and my own daughter does not have the same rights that I had growing up. And so it was time that I inconvenienced myself,” Kolbe told The 19th. “This has become the number one topic for me—I think it’s going to be the number one topic that I support for the rest of my life.”
Recent polls show Trump underwater with even White women, who supported him in 2016 and 2020, and early voting reports show that more women than men have cast ballots nationally and in all battleground states. The gender gap in early voting was widest in Pennsylvania, where NBC News reported an “influx” of new voters who are Democratic women in a state that is essential to Trump’s chances.
Pennsylvania is one of the states being targeted by Women4Us, a group of Republican, moderate and conservative women who are trying to persuade Republican women to back Harris. Stephanie Sharp, who served in the Kansas statehouse and is one of the organization’s co-founders, said that when Kansans just six weeks after Dobbs voted on a constitutional amendment to ban abortion, she thought it would pass in the conservative state—it failed by nearly 20 points.
“Because of that experience, I feel this race differently, I feel an undercurrent that I didn’t know to feel in August of 2022 but now I recognize it again,” Sharp said. “The grandmothers, they remember pre-Roe, they raised their daughters during Roe, and now they’re seeing their granddaughters and having flashbacks to what life was like before Roe, and wondering if that could be the future and the fate of their granddaughters.”
Penny Ettinger, 67, told The 19th after a recent Harris rally in Pennsylvania aimed at Republican supporters, that while she now leans Democratic, she has voted for candidates from both parties. The head of the crime victims’ support organization said she “believes Harris when she says she is going to bring people across the aisle” to work together. “I have two daughters,” she said when noting one of her top issues is abortion. “I’m not about me, I’m about all women—I may have granddaughters some day.”
“What We Have Seen Cannot Stand”
Trump’s final pitch to women is that he will protect them from threats he determines, like immigrants who might commit crimes and trans children who might play sports, while offering no approach for the threat women have identified: the loss of abortion rights.
In late September, at a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump said: “I always thought women liked me, I never thought I had a problem, but the Fake News keeps saying women don’t like me—I don’t believe it.” Then, speaking directly to women, he added: “You will be protected and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free—you will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
In the battleground state of Wisconsin, Trump took his promise a step further, saying he is going to protect women “whether the women like it or not.”
Then, as Trump and Harris held dueling rallies last week in Nevada, Trump suggested that he might put environmental lawyer, anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in charge of women’s health.
“No,” plus a heart emoji, is how Harris responded on the social media site X.
It was perhaps inevitable that sexism would feature prominently in the presidential race. Dozens of women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. Footage of him bragging about groping women leaked late in the 2016 campaign. His running mate, Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, shares views about gender roles and reproductive rights with the white Christian nationalist groups with which Trump has flirted, solidifying his alignment with their political agenda. But the fall of Roe and Harris replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket has fueled a noxious mix of misogyny and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric from the former president and his inner circle.
As Tucker Carlson opened a recent Trump rally in Georgia, the former Fox News host likened Trump to a dad who was going to spank Harris because she has “been a bad little girl.” Trump acolyte Elon Musk’s super PAC cut an ad that called Harris a “big ol’ c-word,” nodding to one of the most offensive words a woman can be called in American English, before eventually saying the “c” stood for communist. Trump has amplified suggestions that Harris traded sex to get ahead in her career.
Harris has her own high-profile backers who are talking about women and reproductive rights.
In late October, superstar Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and former First Lady Michelle Obama gave back-to-back speeches in two symbolic locations.
The singer strode onto the stage in her hometown of Houston and stood defiantly at a lectern in front of a banner that said “vote for reproductive freedom” in Texas, which has set an example with its restrictive and punitive abortion laws. Instead of performing her song “Freedom,” the anthem that Harris picked to represent her campaign, she chose to use her voice in a different way, delivering a speech.
“I’m not here as a celebrity, I’m not here as a politician, I’m here as a mother, a mother who cares deeply about the world my children and all of our children live in, a world where we have the freedom to control our bodies, a world where we’re not divided, a world where our past, our present, our future, merge,” she said, urging the crowd to back Harris as the next president.
The next night, Obama encouraged women to stand up for their rights and appealed to men to support them in Kalamazoo, Michigan, a state where women have crossed party lines to build coalitions that elect Democratic women who support abortion rights.
“Please do not hand our fates over to the likes of Trump, who knows nothing about us, who has shown deep contempt for us. Because a vote for him is a vote against us, against our health, against our worth,” Obama said.
The two speeches were overtly about losing abortion rights, but their descriptions of freedom were similar to themes in the closing case for Harris being targeted at a different audience — women abortion opponents — by another potentially powerful surrogate: former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney.
Cheney lost her seat after prosecuting the congressional case against Trump’s incitement of the insurrection and believes he would lead as an authoritarian. She endorsed Harris early on despite opposing abortion in the past. But she recently linked abortion bans and their impacts to the issue of freedom, saying: “I think that’s where you have women, who like me, have been pro-life, who are saying ‘no’ to this, what we have seen cannot stand.”
After Trump suggested that Cheney should face a firing squad, Cheney wrote on X: “This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. #Womenwillnotbesilenced #VoteKamala.”
Voters are also making these connections between reproductive rights and democracy, as tens of millions of them grapple with the loss of their constitutional right, as the man who paved the way for its decimation makes another attempt at power, after refusing to accept his loss in the last free and fair U.S. presidential election.
While only 6 percent of U.S. adults picked the state of democracy as the most important issue to them this year in the New York Times/Siena College poll, 76 percent agreed that “American democracy is under threat,” and women thought so at higher rates than men did.
And all of this is layered with their feelings about potentially electing the first woman president.
Sharneice Howard, 45, said the two candidates presented such a “stark contrast” to her that once Harris was elevated to the top of the ticket she started getting involved. “I felt energized, I needed to do all that I could to ensure she got elected,” she said as she phonebanked with her 10-year-old daughter at Harris campaign office in Michigan.
Dave Mahloy is a retired executive who went to a Harris event in Georgia and describes himself as a “follower of Jesus” and Trump as an “authoritarian.”
“Having really been pro-life my entire adult life, I now see the danger, really, the unintended consequences of the overturning of Roe in the Dobbs decision, and what that has done to create uncertainty, create health risk, and, frankly, the whole thing about choice—I get it now,” Mahloy said.
Terrolyn Campbell Wheeler, also in Michigan, believes that to save democracy, “we’ve got to flip the script, all the way around, not just partially, the whole way.” She has been phone banking for Harris and walking the block she’s lived on for 30 years, where “everybody knows me as Ms. Terri,” asking her neighbors, especially the young men, if they want to talk to her about the election.
“Can you tell me why you’re going for Trump?” she recently asked an amiable young man; he said it was the economy. “And this is exactly what I said next, I said, ‘King, are you ready to receive?’”
With contributions from Mel Leonor Barclay in Arizona and Jennifer Gerson in Georgia.
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