With only a few weeks to go before the 2024 presidential election, the fate of abortion access in the United States has become a central issue on the campaign trail. While GOP candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, appear to be committed to spreading misinformation about abortion, Democratic challenger Kamala Harris has taken a different approach. On Wednesday, Harris released a new campaign ad featuring the family of Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old Black mother who died in 2022 after her home state of Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws prevented doctors from performing a dilation and curettage (or D&C) that could have saved her life. Watch the ad for yourself above.
“What happened to her is preventable. My daughter is gone because of what Donald Trump did,” Thurman’s mother, Shanette Williams, says in the ad, referencing the Southern abortion bans that followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade—in which Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees voted with the majority—in June of 2022. (Thurman died just two months later, after ending up in the hospital due to a rare complication from taking abortion pills.)
