Kamala Harris said what Biden couldn't about abortion

“Let’s understand how we got here,” Kamala Harris began on Tuesday night, and thus launched three minutes of the most searing defense of reproductive rights we have ever seen in a presidential debate.

Moderators asked the candidates each a question related to abortion. Donald Trump used his time to rewrite history, repeatedly claiming that the overturning of Roe v. Wade was a universally beloved triumph that “everyone wanted.” Harris responded with an incredulity that read as wholly sincere.

“You want to talk about this is what people wanted?” she demanded, wrinkling her brow and looking not at the camera but directly at the man whose appointed Supreme Court Justices had voted to overturn Roe. “Pregnant women who want to carry a pregnancy to term, suffering a miscarriage, being denied care because the health care providers are afraid they might go to jail? And she’s bleeding out in a car in a parking lot? She didn’t want that. Her husband didn’t want that. A 12 or 13-year-old survivor of incest forced to carry a pregnancy to term? They don’t want that.”

She spoke, in a voice dripping with disgust, about the plight faced by rape victims currently living in states with abortion restrictions: “The survivor of a crime of a violation of her body does not have the right to make the decision about what happens to her body next? That is immoral.”

She described the exhausting journey that a cash-strapped woman, already struggling to care for her existing children, might have to make to travel to a state where her abortion would be legal: “Barely can afford to do it, and what you’re putting her through is unconscionable.”

She ended by pointing out that her views on abortion weren’t extreme - they were actually broadly shared around the country: “In every state where this issue has been on the ballot, in red and blue states both, the people of America have voted for freedom.”

Immoral. Unconscionable. Freedom. I have to imagine that each of these terms was carefully chosen, and that each was designed to appropriate conservative buzzwords and use them against the antiabortion regimes that formed in the aftermath of Roe’s undoing. It was not women seeking abortions who are behaving immorally, it was the lawmakers who were ignoring the nuances of these women’s situations and subjecting them to trauma and pain. It was not Democrats who were engaging in big government overreach, it was Republicans who wanted their laws to reach into bedrooms, doctors offices and uteruses.

Joe Biden could never.

In the weeks leading up to the debate, I don’t think there was a person alive who didn’t believe Harris would outperform the current president in her own debate against Trump. Biden’s June appearance was an unmitigated disaster, and Harris’s prosecutorial background made her a natural fit for the debate stage.

But the exchange on abortion - which happened near the beginning of the two-hour debate - solidified that she was not only a better candidate to debate Trump on this issue, she was a damn near perfect one. Biden, a practicing Catholic, carried personal ambivalence over the issue that translated as political squeamishness, and a visible discomfort when discussing it at all. Harris made it clear that there was nothing shameful about discussing abortion, but there should be a lot of shame in thinking about how much agony we are willing to bestow upon desperate women. Bleeding out is not pleasant imagery, but it is necessary.

That moment was a turning point for Harris in the debate. The vice president’s early answers on the economy had meandered. But once she began speaking on abortion, her points started landing, and then she could not miss. Not on questions related to foreign diplomacy, where she pointed out that Trump was a laughingstock to the dictators he seemed to be enamored of, because “they can manipulate you with flattery.” Not on questions related to election interference, when she implored Trump to spend less time “adoring strongmen” and more time “caring about democracy.”

Her abortion answer seemed to orient her toward what would be her most salient point: that Trump’s focus was on himself, while her focus was on what was happening to Americans not named Donald Trump.

He could try to peddle a slipshod narrative about what “everybody wanted,” but she was here to talk about what they got. When Harris described that hypothetical woman in the hospital parking lot, she paused to gesture upstage. As if the car and the woman were right there. Bleeding, dying, for lack of care.