Vice President Kamala Harris misstated former President Donald Trump’s positions on reproductive rights Wednesday at a large rally in North Carolina as she made a closing appeal to undecided voters in the swing state.
“He would ban abortion nationwide. He would restrict access to birth control, put IVF treatments at risk and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies,” the 60-year-old Democratic presidential nominee said in Raleigh.
Trump, 78, says he opposes a federal abortion ban and restrictions on birth control, leaving such issues for state governments to decide. He is campaigning to make IVF free and has not advocated for government monitoring of pregnancies.
Harris contended at the rally that the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 was coterminous with Trump’s own policies, despite the Republican nominee repudiating the document.
“Just Google ‘Project 2025’ — just Google it. Read the plans yourself,” she said — before departing for rallies later in the day in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Some of Trump’s former White House aides helped write Project 2025, but the former president has dismissed its authors as radical “far right” advocates who he’s equated with the “far left.”
Abortion is one of Harris’ top-polling issue areas, making the claims potentially impactful ahead of Election Day on Nov. 5, particularly in North Carolina, where the Republican legislature of the swing state reduced the legal window for most abortions to 12 weeks — down from 20 — after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
As president, Trump appointed three of the justices who voted to rescind federal abortion rights, resulting in abortion bans in many states, with the most severe restrictions in jurisdictions such as Texas, where the procedure is now illegal except in cases of serious health threats to mothers, without exceptions for rape and incest.
Trump has attempted to stake out a middle-ground approach on abortion and said at his Sept. 10 debate with Harris that “no, I’m not in favor of an abortion ban, but it doesn’t matter because this issue has been taken over by the states.” He’s noted that voters in some Republican-dominated states, such as Ohio and Kansas, overwhelming rejected proposed abortion bans.
Trump in August criticized a pending Florida law that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, saying, “I think the six week is too short. It has to be more time,” though his spokespeople later said he wasn’t saying how he’d vote on a state ballot measure dealing with exactly that issue. Trump also has repeatedly called for abortion access in cases of rape, incest and maternal health.
Harris’ invocation of IVF follows an Alabama legal battle this year over whether the procedure was legal, prompting a Trump-backed state legislative clarification that IVF was allowed, despite the procedure sometimes involving the destruction of human embryos.
Trump proposed making IVF free nationwide in August, saying, “Under the Trump administration, your government will pay for — or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for — all costs associated with IVF treatment. We want more babies.”
Harris has not said if she supports making IVF free. Treatments cost $15,000 to $20,000 per cycle, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump also says he wants contraception to remain available, writing in May on Truth Social that “I have never, and will never advocate imposing restrictions on birth control, or other contraceptives.”
