Vice President Harris galvanized supporters at a rally at a historically black sorority house on Tuesday, drawing cheers from the crowd as she promised to enact abortion protections “if I’m president.”
Harris was in Indianapolis to attend the Grand Boulet, the main gathering of Zeta Phi Beta sorority, a historically black sorority known as the Divine Nine. The vice president delivered remarks similar to those she has given since being identified as the likely Democratic nominee to replace President Biden, with a particular emphasis on protecting freedoms such as voting rights and reproductive rights.
“Across the country, we are witnessing an all-out assault on hard-won freedoms and rights,” she said. “The freedom to vote. The freedom to protect ourselves from gun violence. The freedom of women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have the government dictate what they do to them.”
Harris argued that women don’t have to abandon their faith to agree that the government shouldn’t tell them what to do with their bodies, and she also tried to directly link former President Trump to the violation of abortion rights across the country.
“Former President Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court justices during his presidency with the intent of overturning Roe v. Wade,” she said, “and they accomplished just that.”
“If I were president of the United States and Congress passed legislation to restore these freedoms, I would sign it into law,” Harris said to applause. “We’re not playing around.”
Harris has become the face of the White House’s messaging on protecting abortion access in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and is likely to make it a central theme of her presidential campaign in hopes of boosting Democratic turnout.
Trump has repeatedly boasted about appointing judges who overturned Roe v. Wade, but he has also strongly argued that states should be free to implement abortion laws themselves, leaving some states with a right to abortion while others, like Florida and Texas, have passed near-total bans.
