Harris condemns Trump in Georgia after news of abortion-related deaths

In her first speech dedicated exclusively to abortion rights since becoming the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris spoke on Friday afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming Donald Trump for the abortion bans that now blanket much of the United States.

Harris spoke days after news broke that two Georgia mothers died after being unable to access legal abortions and adequate medical care in the state.

In the weeks since becoming the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign. She has toured the country to highlight the healthcare consequences of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which paved the way for more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions.

Although Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, becoming the first Democrat in decades to take the state, Democrats seemed unlikely to recapture it until Harris replaced Biden as nominee. Now, Georgia is once again a swing state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and a major Trump surrogate, has said that Trump must win Georgia if he wants to win the White House. Meanwhile, Harris in August embarked on a two-day bus tour of the state and giving her first major network interview there.

Although Georgia permits abortions in medical emergencies, doctors across the country have said that abortion exceptions are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable. Instead, doctors have said, they are forced to watch until patients get sick enough to legally intervene.