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Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz was back on the Sunday circuit this week and took to Fox News in an effort to reach the conservative voters the Harriz-Walz campaign is increasingly trying to attract.
Walz appeared on Fox News Sunday for an interview with Shannon Bream just days after Harris herself rallied alongside former Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the Republican co-chair of the January 6 committee.
Bream questioned Walz about changes to Minnesota law that conservatives have falsely claimed will allow doctors to let babies “born alive” during exceedingly rare abortions performed after 21 weeks of gestation.
Democrats and medical experts have roundly rejected those claims, noting that doctors still have ethical obligations to provide care to any patient in their custody, and pointing out the obvious fact that no cases of babies dying in this manner have ever been recorded.
Walz called those questions a “distraction” from discussions about Republican-led efforts to restrict abortion both at the state level and nationally, which even when organized to allow for legal exceptions in the case of life-threatening emergencies have led to real, tangible examples of women dyinng and being seriously injured by delays of essential care.
“This is a distraction from the real issue here [which] is women being forced into miscarriages, women being forced to go back home, get sepsis, potentially die,” he said. “Maternal mortality rates in Texas have skyrocketed off the charts because of this. This is bad policy.”
Referring to Donald Trump calling the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v Wade a “beautiful thing”, Walz said that “it’s not a beautiful thing to see women dying. It’s not a beautiful thing to put doctors at risk of being imprisoned.”
The Harris-Walz campaign has moved to highlight examples of women injured or killed by delays in lifesaving abortion care due to Republican-led anti-abortion laws, while also pounding Republicans for the supposed plan to create a national abortion registry under Project 2025 — part of efforts by conservatives to respond to women seeking abortion care across state lines, even when living in states where bans are in place.
Opponents of abortion rights have claimed for years that American political opinion will trend away from support for the provisions of Roe v Wade in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to revoke the ruling.
But the opposite has happened. Polling shows that more Americans now support protecting access to legal abortion care in most cases.
Donald Trump continues to tout his own role in the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision, given his nomination of three justices to the bench, while trying to distance his campaign from state-level bans in Florida and other places.
And despite bans snapping into place in states with conservative local governments, the number of abortions performed in the US increased last year over 2022.
