Vice President Kamala Harris said she supports changing the Senate filibuster rule to return nationwide access to abortions.
In an interview with Wisconsin Public Radio on Tuesday, Harris said the elimination of the rule would allow a vote on abortion rights to reach the Senate floor.
Under Harris’ proposal, lawmakers would codify the ruling made in Roe v. Wade, which essentially required states to allow access to abortions until a fetus is viable. Generally, states were barred from regulating abortions for the first 20 weeks of a pregnancy prior to a 2022 Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. The ruling allowed numerous Republican-held states to enact near or total abortion bans.
“While the presidential election is extremely important and dispositive of where we go moving forward, it also is about what we need to do to hold onto the Senate and win seats in the House,” Harris said. “That being said, I’ve been very clear, I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe … to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body and not have their government tell them what to do.”