DNC Spotlights Tragic Situations to Push Abortion Throughout Pregnancy

The Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Monday night featured several women with tragic pregnancy stories in order to push the party’s abortion-on-demand agenda.

Three women — Amanda Zurawski, Kaitlyn Joshua, and Hadley Duvall — spoke about their experiences with abortion, miscarriage, pregnancy, and pregnancy as the result of rape and incest. All three have been campaigning for the Democrat presidential ticket, both for President Joe Biden before he dropped out and now for Vice President Kamala Harris, and have been featured in campaign advertisements.

Zurawski, for example, has testified that her doctors informed her of an inevitable miscarriage at 17 weeks of pregnancy but refused to perform an abortion because the baby’s heart was still beating. She ended up developing septic shock, was in intensive care for three days, and, ultimately, lost one of her fallopian tubes. Her case occurred after the Supreme Court ended Roe v. Wade and returned the issue of abortion to individual states. Zurawski was located in Texas, which subsequently outlawed abortions except when the mother is “at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function unless the abortion is performed or induced.” Under the law, doctors found guilty of performing illegal abortions in the state can face up to 99 years in prison, incur a $100,000 fine, and lose their medical license.

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately rejected her challenge to the state’s abortion law, noting that the law contains exceptions for the life of the mother and for serious injury and “does not require a woman’s death to be imminent or that she first suffer physical impairment,” the court said.

At the DNC, Zurawski blamed former President Donald Trump, claimed that a second Trump term “would rip away even more of our rights,” and claimed that he would pass a national abortion ban. Trump has repeatedly said he believes abortion should be left to individual states. Abortions have notably drastically increased since the issue was returned to individual states.

“We cannot let that happen. We need to vote as if lives depend on it because they do,” she said, while not acknowledging the millions of unborn lives lost to abortion. 

Duvall, while not directly affected by the fall of Roe, was raped by her stepfather, became pregnant when she was 12 years old, and ended up miscarrying. She is in her 20s now and has become an abortion activist in her home state of Kentucky, which has a near-total abortion restriction following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“​​I can’t imagine not having a choice. But today, that’s the reality for many women and girls across the country because of Donald Trump’s abortion bans,” she said, although Trump himself has not passed state abortion laws and has said he personally believes in exceptions for rape, incest, and the life of the mother.

“Kamala Harris will sign a national law to restore the right to an abortion. She’ll fight for every woman and every girl, even those who are not fighting for her,” Duvall added. 

Harris, who has refused to cite any abortion limits she supports, has indeed picked up where Joe Biden’s reelection campaign left off, employing the same strategies and promising to restore the right to abortion federally, which would undo pro-life laws around the country. 

Part of Biden’s, and now Harris’s, abortion strategy is to create confusion by lumping elective abortions in with other things like birth control and miscarriages (also medically referred to as spontaneous abortion) under the umbrella term “reproductive health.” It is a strategy that Democrats have employed since the fall of Roe, some claiming that women will be unable to obtain miscarriage and ectopic pregnancy care or even birth control if abortion is limited.

Democrats then point to high-profile cases of women like Zurawski who were denied abortions in states with abortion restrictions and hold them up examples of how dangerous abortion laws allegedly are.

“The Democrats want to pursue expanded access to abortion, and they’re using those difficult cases as leverage in a political fight to push through new laws that [would] increase the number of abortions that would be available,” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America Vice President of State Affairs Stephen Billy previously said. 

“The president will use tragic situations, heartbreaking situations, purely to advance a political agenda because he is tied to the progressive left-wing of the party, and he is tied to the abortion advocates who won’t support limits at any stage in pregnancy,” he noted before Biden had dropped out. 

Ultimately, abortion is Harris’s number one campaign issue, as it was for Biden before his exit from the race. While most polling shows that abortion is not a top priority for voters, one in four Democrats are single-issue voters on abortion and the majority of independents identify as “pro-choice.” The focus on abortion and painting Republicans as dangerous to women also seems like a ploy to distract from Americans’ top concerns under the Biden-Harris administration: the flailing economy and the border, which is essentially open.