Vice President Kamala Harris appeared to draw a connection between the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade the legacy of slavery over the weekend.
Harris made the comparison while participating in a fireside conversation Saturday afternoon with actress Keke Palmer at the Essence Festival, one of the nation’s largest African American cultural gatherings which took place in New Orleans. While speaking to the crowd, the vice president argued that the high court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization served as an example of the United States “trying to claim ownership over human bodies.”
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“This is a serious matter,” Harris began while denouncing the court’s decision. “And it requires all of us to speak up, to speak out, and to be active.”
“We have to recognize we’re a nation that was founded on certain principles that are — that are grounded in the concept of freedom and liberty,” she continued moments later. “We also know that we’ve had a history in this country of government trying to claim ownership over human bodies. And we had supposedly evolved from that time and that way of thinking. So this is very problematic on so many levels.”
While she did not explicitly reference slavery, Harris’s comment about the country’s history of “government trying to claim ownership over human bodies” appeared to serve as a reference to the darkest stain on the United States’ legacy.
The VP’s remarks came eight days after the nation’s highest bench announced that it would reverse the 1973 landmark ruling, which had guaranteed nationwide abortion access for nearly half a century. The court’s decision gave states the authority to determine limits on when a woman can terminate a pregnancy.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” read a syllabus of the high court’s opinion.
Harris has spoken out repeatedly in the last week against the court’s ruling, arguing that the decision would spark a “health care crisis.”
“Millions of women in America will go to bed tonight without access to the healthcare and reproductive care that they had this morning,” she told a crowd in Illinois last Friday, just hours after the ruling came down. “Without access to the same healthcare or reproductive healthcare that their mothers and grandmothers had for 50 years.”
“Today’s decision on that theory, then, calls into question other rights that we thought were settled,” including interracial and same-sex marriage, she added during her Friday speech.
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She told CNN on Monday that Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion, in which he called on the high court to re-examine cases related to LGBTQ+ rights and access to contraception, further confirmed the concerns she voiced in her Friday speech.
“I definitely believe this is not over. I do. I think he just said the quiet part out loud,” Harris said of Thomas.
