Vice President Kamala Harris warned that “women will die” if the Supreme Court overturns the precedent on abortion it previously set in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, but pro-life advocates countered that the solution to maternal mortality cannot be the killing of unborn babies.
“I don’t mean to sound alarmist. I mean this: Women will die,” Harris told The San Francisco Chronicle in an interview published Sunday.
She made the prediction while discussing the pivotal case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which the court is weighing whether all pre-viability restrictions on elective abortion are unconstitutional. “Women will die,” Harris repeated. “In particular, women who don’t have economic resources and can’t then travel to places or somehow have access to safe reproductive health care, including abortion. And it is not an extreme statement — it is a fact.”
Harris had previously predicted that women would die if Roe v. Wade gets overturned. She declined to say what the White House will do if the court does overturn Roe.
Harris’ office did not respond to Fox News’ request for further elaboration. Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and EMILY’s List also did not respond to request for comment.
Pro-life advocates slammed Harris’ prediction in comments to Fox News.
“Vice President Harris’s statement that ‘women will die’ if Roe is overturned relies heavily on the lie that abortion is safe and necessary for women,” Mary Szoch, director of the Center for Human Dignity at the Family Research Council, said. “She fails to acknowledge that the United States has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world, while having the most liberal abortion laws in the world.”
Szoch noted that the maternal mortality rate for Black women in Washington, D.C., is 71 deaths per 100,000 births, even though women in D.C. have access to abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
