GRAND RAPIDS, Michigan — Vice President Kamala Harris excoriated the Alabama Supreme Court for ruling that frozen embryos are children.
Harris opened an abortion-centric event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, criticizing the court, alongside Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI), who has urged Harris and President Joe Biden to underscore the importance of abortion and other reproductive healthcare access before November’s general elections, not only in her battleground state but across the country.
“As the governor said, most recently, putting access to [in vitro fertilization] at risk. Think about that. Individuals, couples who want to start a family are now being deprived of access to what can help them start a family,” Harris told reporters Thursday. “On the one hand, the proponents are saying that an individual doesn’t have a right to end an unwanted pregnancy and, on the other hand, the individual does not have the right to start a family.”
“The hypocrisy abounds on this issue,” she said.
Grand Rapids is the fourth stop of Harris’s “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour, which started on what would have been the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade last month in Wisconsin, another battleground state. In Michigan, the 11th state Harris has traveled to this year, the vice president convened a roundtable conversation with medical providers, patients, and reproductive healthcare advocates, in addition to state and local leaders, including Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), as well as Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure.
“Repealing Roe v. Wade was only step one,” Whitmer said. “A coordinated assault on bodily autonomy and family life is ongoing. They’ve shown us their next steps — a national abortion ban, put healthcare providers behind bars, ban emergency contraception, ban birth control and IVF, as we just saw in Alabama this week, banning mifepristone — this is their playbook.”
Michigan last year proposed and passed Proposal 3, a state constitutional amendment that protects access to abortion, supplementing the repeal of a 1931 law prohibiting the procedure, without exceptions for rape or incest, and other legislation criminalizing the provision of medication terminating pregnancies. Michigan Democrats now control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature.
Biden, Harris, and other down-ballot Democrats are hoping to campaign on the issue of abortion before November despite Republicans contending voters are more concerned regarding the economy, immigration, and crime.
“What is happening in Alabama right now is only possible because Donald Trump’s Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez wrote in a statement. “Across the nation, MAGA Republicans are inserting themselves into the most personal decisions a family can make, from contraception to IVF.”
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“With their latest attack on reproductive freedom, these so-called pro-life Republicans are preventing loving couples from growing their families,” she said. “If Donald Trump is elected, there is no question that he will impose his extreme anti-freedom agenda on the entire country.”
The Alabama Supreme Court ruled last Friday, as part of two wrongful death lawsuits brought by three sets of parents whose embryos were removed from a cryogenic nursery by a patient at a Mobile hospital, dropped, and destroyed, that “extrauterine children,” or unborn children “located outside of a biological uterus at the time they are killed,” are children and covered by the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
