Abortion on the ballot paper in US election as Trump and Harris fiercely contest the issue

Things are a little out of kilter in Arizona these days.
Temperatures in Phoenix, America’s hottest city, plummeted between Sunday and Monday, having surpassed 43 degrees in October for the first time ever this year.
While that sudden change can be explained by the arrival of a cold front, the indications from several closely watched political contests in this swing state are a little tougher to decipher.
Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris has, in part, hitched her electoral wagon to reproductive rights in response to the US supreme court in 2022 overturning Roe v Wade, the 1973 legal decision that established the right to access abortion across the country.
Tight limits have since been introduced in some Republican-controlled states, among them Texas and Georgia, in response to a ruling made possible by her Republican rival Donald Trump’s appointment of three conservative judges to the court during his term in office.
“We are fighting for a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body,” Harris said last week when campaigning in Texas. “I pledge to you, when Congress passes a Bill to restore reproductive freedom nationwide, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.”
[ US election explained: Could the abortion debate decide the US presidency?Opens in new window ]
Abortion is on the ballot in Arizona and, if approved by voters, Proposition 139 would add a fundamental right to access it to the Grand Canyon state’s constitution.
“I think abortion is an important issue here, after inflation and immigration, for a few reasons,” says Kim Fridkin, foundation professor in the School of Politics at Arizona State University. “One is that Arizona did have a zombie Bill from the 1860s come back to life.”
In April, as the uncertainty swirled after the Roe decision, a civil war era provision was resurrected by the state’s supreme court upholding a near-total ban on abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest. A court soon afterwards placed a stay on the “zombie” law, but it remained unclear as to what doctors could legally do. It was later repealed, and Arizona law permitted abortions until 15 weeks, albeit with some conditions.
Proposition 139 seeks to bring clarity to the situation. Fridkin says the topic is a “motivating force for a lot of people in Arizona and there has been a lot of campaigning on the issue”.
The abortion measure looks set to pass comfortably but, for all her focus on the issue, polls show Harris trailing Trump, who has taken credit for creating the current situation, in the battle for Arizona’s 12 electoral college votes.
[ US election explained: How does the electoral college work?Opens in new window ]
Another interesting race here is for a US Senate seat, with former Fox TV presenter Kari Lake facing Democrat Ruben Gallego. Lake has tied herself closely to Trump and, before a meet-and-greet at Biscuits Café on Thunderbird Road in Phoenix, one of her supporters, Dean “the Marine” Tomlinson, is sporting an impressively colourful shirt depicting the July assassination attempt on the former president. It features the slogan “Legends Never Die.”
Tomlinson has to contend with the flapping of the maroon “Lake for Senate” flag attached to the ball hitch of his pickup truck as he shows waiting members of the media his own creations, “Don’t Tread on My Vote” T-shirts. But then a bus pulls up with an eye-catching design of its own – a decal showing Lake and Trump set against a background of the Grand Canyon and the US flag. “Make Arizona Grand Again,” it states.
The Maga acolyte appears on a high as she alights, with members of her campaign team pointing to an opinion poll suggesting she and Gallego are in a near dead heat, a huge improvement on where things stood a month ago.
Lake mentions immigration and the economy as she addresses her audience, telling them that “DC doesn’t want to know me” as she is not part of the “swamp”. But abortion is not raised, as it has proven a bit of a sticky subject. She had previously described it as “the ultimate sin” and said abortion pills should be illegal, but Lake has, like Trump, adjusted.
According to her website, she now recognises that a majority in Arizona and the US “hold the view that abortion should be legal with restrictions against late-term and partial-birth” abortions. “Arizona’s law currently allows abortions up to 15 weeks, and Kari does not support a federal ban on abortion. Abortion is, as the courts decided, an issue for states to decide, not the federal government.”
Over in Georgia, many campaigners and voters would like to be in the throes of an abortion debate, with access in the state restricted to six weeks in most cases as a result of decision by the state’s supreme court after Roe was struck down.
AC Coquillas, of the Atlanta-based Feminist Women’s Health Centre, a reproductive health clinic, says the situation has placed “a ban on a person’s autonomy and their ability to make a choice”. The numbers accessing the centre’s services have fallen by about 20 per cent.
“As soon as you take away a person’s ability to make a decision that they would otherwise make, you instil a lot of shame, you instil fear and people do begin to feel as if they are alone and is if they have to fly under the radar and figure out how to exist on the margins of society.”
Two tragic cases in Georgia have been brought to light in reporting by the publication Pro Publica – those of Candi Miller and Amber Thurman, whose deaths were deemed “preventable” by a team of maternal health experts. Their stories sparked debate about maternal mortality in the US, particularly among black women.
Miller (41), a mother of three with several health conditions, discovered she was pregnant and took abortion pills she ordered online, but required further medical attention.
“Unfortunately, out of an abundance of concern and fear of the law, Candi did not seek out further help,” Coquillas says. “If she had come to us, or if she had gone to a hospital, they would have been able to assess that what was happening in her body was akin to a miscarriage, and miscarriage management, even under an abortion ban, is totally legal and permissible to seek out.”
Thurman, a medical assistant and mother of one, travelled to North Carolina to obtain abortion pills and experienced complications after taking them, which resulted in a severe infection.
“Amber Thurman, actually, she did go to a hospital and did try to explain her situation,” Coquillas says. “Unfortunately, in that case, rather than the person suffering from the health scare, the doctors felt so fearful of the law coming down … that they, I can only assume with all of those things in their head, determined that the best case would be to wait and see to get more clarity on the law in order to find out what next steps were.”
However, too much time passed, and Thurman ended up dying of septic shock aged just 28.
One of those seeking to change the situation for women in Georgia is Shea Roberts, a Democrat member of the state’s House of Representatives. She has told her own abortion story to highlight how even planned pregnancies can end tragically.
Roberts was 37 and wanted to have a child with her partner to add to their blended family. She had a scan at 12 weeks and testing detected trisomy 18, a rare genetic disorder, and was told the foetus “was incompatible with life”.
Abortion was legal in Georgia up to 20 weeks at that stage, and Roberts researched the condition before making a “heart-wrenching decision” to terminate the pregnancy.
“It is not an easy story to tell and it’s a shame that we have to keep telling these stories to make people understand,” she said, adding that knowing her daughters, one of whom is studying at Trinity College Dublin, would not be able to make the same decision is troubling.
During the house’s last term, Roberts, with support from a reproductive health coalition, drafted the Reproductive Freedom Act in an attempt to change the situation. “We couldn’t even get a hearing,” she says, adding that the state’s Republican-led political system “refuses to even talk about it despite the fact a majority of Georgians want to talk about these things”.
In advance of the Bill underpinning the six-week limit being passed, she says doctors testified that “women would die, that it was dangerous, and now we’re starting to see those results”.
However, the Irish citizen acknowledges that not even having Harris in the White House could change the situation in Georgia as things stand, so she has been working to see the Democrats take the Senate to have a chance of a Bill getting a hearing.
“I’ve talked about how Ireland has done this because of a similar situation,” Roberts says. “It does give me hope that at some point [things can change] but right now, with Trump and Maga Republicans being so extreme, we’re not in a normal situation like Ireland was at that time … Cutting through that noise is really challenging right now.”