The administration’s task force on reproductive rights also announced what officials said were new steps to help Americans get contraceptives and abortions under an emergency care law.
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaking about reproductive rights last year in Tallahassee, Fla.
Vice President Kamala Harris will travel to Wisconsin on Monday morning to host an event in support of abortion rights while President Biden brings together a task force on reproductive health care in Washington.
Both events are designed to call attention to the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion, and to announce new steps that Mr. Biden’s administration has taken to support abortion access since the court struck it down in 2022.
“Even as Americans — from Ohio to Kentucky to Michigan to Kansas to California — have resoundingly rejected attempts to limit reproductive freedom, Republican elected officials continue to push for a national ban and devastating new restrictions across the country,” Mr. Biden said in a statement. “On this day and every day, Vice President Harris and I are fighting to protect women’s reproductive freedom.”
Ms. Harris, who has become the administration’s most vocal defender of abortion rights, chose Wisconsin as the backdrop for the first in a series of abortion rights events her office has planned around the country through the spring. Kirsten Allen, the vice president’s press secretary, said that Ms. Harris’s office had planned several more stops, over the next two to three months, in “states that have enshrined protections, restricted access and states that continue to threaten access, causing chaos and confusion.”
Wisconsin is crucial to Mr. Biden’s re-election prospects — he won there by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and recent polling suggests a close race in 2024. It was also a target of former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to spread falsehoods about illegal voting in 2020.
But Democrats hope that a series of victories for abortion rights advocates in Wisconsin could signal a wider trend ahead of the general election. In April, Wisconsin voters elected a liberal candidate to the state’s Supreme Court by an 11-point margin. In September, Planned Parenthood began providing abortions again after a judge ruled that an 1849 state restriction against them — which had been invalidated by Roe until it fell — was not enforceable.
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Source: nytimes.com