As Georgia prepares to mark two years since the state’s strict abortion law took effect on Saturday, Democrats and supporters of abortion rights continue their efforts to tie former President Donald Trump to setting the stage for allowing states to limit the procedure.
President Joe Biden’s campaign hosted a panel discussion Friday featuring local and national abortion rights providers and advocates as he tries to make abortion access a central theme of his reelection campaign.
“Human rights are at risk this November,” said Shawana Moore, a women’s health nurse practitioner and professor at Emory University. “If they take away the right to reproductive health, what do you think is next?”
Moore is featured in a new Biden campaign ad released Friday where she says patients and health care providers have been mired in “fear and uncertainty” since Trump’s three U.S. Supreme Court appointments helped overturn Roe v. Wade.
The nation’s highest court in 2022 decided there is no constitutional right to abortion when it ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning the nearly 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision that said the opposite.
The decision paved the way to allow a 2019 Georgia law to take effect. The Republican-backed law bans most abortions once a doctor can detect fetal cardiac activity, typically about six weeks into a pregnancy and before many know they are pregnant.
Trump has said he doesn’t support a national ban on abortion but instead wants the policy to be decided by the states.
But Biden supporters say Project 2025, a set of conservative policy blueprints they say would guide a second Trump presidency, would implement several additional restrictions. The former president has worked to distance himself from the 920-page policy outline.
“President Trump has long been consistent in supporting the rights of states to make decisions on abortion,” a Trump campaign spokesman said.
The Republican Party, at Trump’s urging, recently shifted its approach to abortion in its platform. For the first time in nearly four decades, the party platform no longer directly calls for a nationwide ban on abortion, but GOP officials say they will continue pushing states to extend “personhood” rights to embryos and fetuses. Both approaches essentially have the same effect — banning the procedure — abortion rights advocates say.
Biden supporters also point to statements made by the former president’s running mate, JD Vance, who said he backed “some minimum national standard” to restrict the procedure after a certain number of weeks.
Abortion rights advocates and providers have challenged the 2019 law in state court. The Georgia Supreme Court last year overturned a lower-court ruling that would have repealed the law but sent it back to Fulton Superior Court for further consideration. A Fulton Superior Court judge has not taken further action on the case.
State Sen. Ed Setzler, the Acworth Republican who sponsored the 2019 abortion law, said his colleagues and constituents are mostly satisfied with how the procedure has been limited in Georgia.
“I think we’ve struck this balance,” Setzler said. “I think it’s unfortunate that children from conception to (so-called) heartbeat are still losing their lives. But I think Georgians are comfortable staying where we are.”
Georgia Democrats in 2022 tried to connect Republican lawmakers to the abortion ban as a way to get more voters to support their party’s candidates in statewide races. But other than the reelection of Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, those efforts failed, with every other statewide office going to Republican candidates.
But Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said as more time passes, more voters can see how abortion bans bring consequences, intended or unintended, such as limits to in vitro fertilization or doctors turning away patients going through a miscarriage for fear of prosecution.
“The longer we go from the bans being in place, the more horror stories we’re hearing,” she said. “Our job is to educate Georgia voters on how extreme this crisis has become, and that they have options (including voting for Biden) to get out of it.”
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