Trump and Harris' stance on issues ranging from abortion to immigration

Mrs Harris would like enshrine the protection of Roe v. Wade in federal law after the Supreme Court overturned it.

“When I am President of the United States, I will sign legislation restoring and protecting reproductive freedom in every state,” she wrote in July. To do so, she would need not only Democratic majorities in Congress, but also 50 senators willing to abolish the filibuster system, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation.

Ms Harris said last year that she and President Biden would envision a law modeled on Roe. As modified by Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Roe broadly protected the right to abortion until a fetus can survive outside the womb, but allowed bans after that as long as there were exceptions for medical emergencies. “We're not trying to do anything that didn't exist before June of last year,” she told CBS News.

As a senator, she co-sponsored a bill called the Women's Health Protection Act, which would have gone a bit further than Roe by prohibiting some state-level restrictions, such as requiring doctors to perform certain tests or have hospital admitting privileges to perform abortions. She reiterated her support for it in 2022.

During her 2019 presidential campaign, she also argued that states that have historically restricted abortion rights in violation of Roe should be subject to “pre-approval” for new abortion laws, meaning those laws would have to be approved at the federal level before they can take effect. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment on whether she would still support this if Congress codified Roe. (Without such codification, the proposal is moot.)

Since there were no majorities in Congress capable of codifying Roe, Biden’s Cabinet took administrative action to try limit the impact of state abortion bansand Mrs Harris has signalled her support for these measures.

The Department of Health and Human Services told hospitals in 2022 that an emergency room law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, requires doctors to perform an abortion if they believe it is necessary to stabilize a patient. (That order is the subject of legal challenges that the Supreme Court has not yet ruled on.) In April, the same department announced a rule that would protect the medical records of many abortion patients from investigators and prosecutors.