Joe Biden and Kamala Harris kicked off their first joint campaign rally of 2024 in Manassas, Virginia, on Tuesday, with a focused plea for voters to send them back to the White House on one key issue: protecting abortion rights.
This fight over abortion, they said, is about freedom.
“Extremists have proposed and passed laws that criminalized doctors and punished women. Laws that make no exception even for rape or incest,” said Harris, who spoke first, before the US president.
“And let us all agree: one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body.”
Virginia was a telling first stop for the 2024 campaign, where Biden and Harris were accompanied by first lady, Jill Biden, and the second gentleman Doug Emhoff. Last year, during the state’s elections, Virginia Republicans failed to take control of the state legislature after campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban. Seven other states have also voted directly on abortion-related ballot referendums since Roe fell at the hand of the right-leaning US supreme court in 2022; in each case, including in red states, abortion rights supporters won.
Now, Biden and Harris are betting that outrage over the decision to overturn Roe – the result of the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization case out of Mississippi – will send them back to the White House.
“I don’t think this court and the Maga Republicans have any clue about the power of women in America,” Biden told the crowd, referring to the loyal base of supporters of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again election slogan. “I don’t think they have any clue. But they’re about to find out.”
Stories of women who say they were denied medically necessary abortions have been particularly powerful in sustaining post-Roe outrage. One of those women, Amanda Zurawski, took the stage to introduce Biden. Zurawski is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit in Texas that now involves dozens of women who say the state’s ban blocked them from getting abortions.
“What I went through was nothing short of barbaric,” Zurawski told the crowd. “And it didn’t need to happen. But it did, because of Donald Trump. Over and over again, Donald Trump brags about killing Roe v Wade. It is unthinkable to me that anyone could cheer on these abortion bans that nearly took my life.”
Although the Republican primary was still unfolding in New Hampshire on Tuesday, Trump was the clear and repeated target of the rally, as the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Trump appointed three of the US supreme court justices who overturned Roe. While he was first running for president in 2016, he also suggested that women who get abortions should be punished in some way – a stance that he later walked back, but was repeatedly mentioned at Tuesday’s rally.
“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, referring to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. He added: “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”
Further abortion bans are not the only threats on the table, Biden said. Because the Roe decision descends from a line of supreme court decisions that protect the right to privacy, overturning that decision also threatens access to birth control and same-sex marriage. He promised to codify the protections of Roe into law, as he has said in the past.
However, that promise is unlikely to come true anytime soon, given that Congress has shown little interest in moving substantively forward on bills that would enshrine similar protections as those that were in Roe.
Protesters interrupted Biden’s speech eight times. One man, who was carrying a Palestinian flag, shouted: “How many kids have you killed?” A woman later interrupted Biden by shouting: “Israel kills two mothers every hour.”
They were escorted out of the crowd. During each interruption, the crowd behind the speakers started to chant “Four more years!” and “Let’s go, Joe!”
