Throughout a number of latest appearances, Harris additionally criticized the Dobbs ruling that overturned the constitutional proper to abortion and bemoaned the aftermath of tattered entry to that care, whereas affirming that she’ll “struggle for a lady’s proper to decide on.” This spring, Harris turned the primary vp to publicly go to an abortion supplier—a Deliberate Parenthood in Minnesota, along with her now operating mate Tim Walz, one other champion for reproductive justice. And in her coverage plan, she has explicitly promised to “by no means permit a nationwide abortion ban to develop into regulation.” No marvel a number of reproductive-rights orgs (like Reproductive Freedom for All and Emily’s Listing) have endorsed her marketing campaign.

This month, Harris kicked off a nationwide 50-stop “reproductive freedom bus tour” in Florida. With speeches from Harris and Walz, in addition to Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, Walz’s spouse Gwen, and reproductive rights advocates, the tour goals to focus on Harris’s purpose of restoring Roe v. Wade’s protections whereas portray a transparent distinction between her imaginative and prescient to extend bodily autonomy and the Trump Administration’s historical past of proscribing it.

And she or he’s not simply speaking the discuss; Harris’s stance rests on a legacy of motion. As a senator, she cosponsored the Ladies’s Well being Safety Act, which might ban states from creating necessities that make abortion care harder to entry. Earlier than that, as California’s lawyer common, she prosecuted an anti-abortion activist who allegedly illegally recorded conversations at a Deliberate Parenthood, and he or she additionally sponsored a invoice that sought to control disaster being pregnant facilities (that are recognized to influence individuals to not get abortions based mostly on medically inaccurate counseling).

As Harris has shared, her motivation is deeply private: In highschool, she realized that her greatest good friend was being molested. “So the concept that somebody who survives a criminal offense of violence to their physique wouldn’t have the authority to decide about what occurs to their physique subsequent, that’s immoral,” she instructed a crowd in Jacksonville, Florida, in Might.

Again to high

Gun violence

Making certain “the liberty to reside protected from the phobia of gun violence,” as Harris put it at her first marketing campaign occasion this 12 months, is a serious precedence for her. Arguably amongst her most spectacular accomplishments as VP is working with President Biden in 2022 to move the landmark Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA), which, amongst a ton of efforts to decrease the constant risk of gun violence, strengthened background-check necessities, made straw buying (shopping for a gun for somebody who legally can not) a criminal offense, sought to take away weapons from the arms of those that’d dedicated home violence, and supplied tens of thousands and thousands in grant funding to ramp up college safety.

And when Biden created the White Home Workplace of Gun Violence Prevention shortly after, he selected Harris to supervise it. Since then, she’s labored carefully with Biden to place facets of the BSCA into follow, like collaborating with the Division of Justice to make clear when an individual has to get a license to promote weapons and conduct background checks. And this 12 months, throughout a go to to Marjory Stoneman Douglas Excessive Faculty (the positioning of the Parkland, Florida, mass capturing in 2018), Harris introduced the launch of a federal useful resource heart to assist with the implementation of Excessive Threat or “crimson flag” legal guidelines (which permit a decide to briefly seize a gun from an individual who could also be a risk to themselves or others).