Jill Biden warned that women could die under a Donald Trump presidency as she stressed the importance of reproductive rights in this year’s election.
The first lady, during a rally in Arizona to get out the vote for Kamala Harris, warned that Trump was turning the country back to its pre-Roe vs. Wade time after his picks to the Supreme Court helped strike down the landmark abortions rights ruling.
‘Secrecy, shame, silence, danger, even death. That was the reality back then, and that’s where Donald Trump has left women today,’ she said.
She noted after Roe was repealed, she was ‘shocked, devastated, but looking back, I knew I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I knew that Donald Trump had hand-picked three justices to restrict reproductive freedom.’
Democrats see abortion rights as a winning issue having used it to who rally their base to the voting booth in the 2022 midterm elections.
The first lady, who is on a five-state campaign swing for Harris, will push that issue repeatedly during her stops in key battleground states.
Abortion is a major issue in Arizona, which has Proposition 139, an amendment to the Arizona Constitution to add a fundamental right to an abortion, on its November ballot.
The first lady’s stop was part of the Harris campaign’s Reproductive Freedom Bus Tour, which is holding several stops in Arizona.
Actors Bryan Cranston and Sophia Bush are a part of the tour. Biden greeted both of them with hugs as she thanked the volunteers on the bus.
Trump has tried to both take credit for the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, which as been a longtime goal of evangelical and conservative voters – while avoiding the political fallout. He has said abortion rights should be decided by the states.
Biden, during her remarks in Phoenix on Saturday night, warned that ‘today our daughters and granddaughters are living with fewer rights than we had.’
This November 10 states will have abortion measures on their ballot seeking to either affirm that the state constitution protects the right to abortion or that nothing in the constitution confers such a right, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 13 states have a total abortion ban and 28 states have abortion bans based on gestational duration.
‘The government shouldn’t be telling women what to do. So let’s elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz,’ Biden told the cheering crowd.
She urged people do to it for the ‘generations of women who have fought for our rights and for all the men who understand that this is their fight too.’
And she added: ‘Young girls will grow up in the world we will decide this November.’
Arizona is one of the most-contested battlegrounds of the 2024 election. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are spending considerable resources here.
And it’s where Jill Biden made her first ever campaign stop for Kamala Harris, touting her candidacy in two-days worth of events.
Trump will hold a rally in Phoenix on Sunday. He is leading 51% to Harris’ 46% in the state a New York Times/Sienna poll found.
The first lady used her earlier events in Arizona to slam Trump for supporting abortion bans and tax breaks for corporations, describing the former president as greedy and selfish.
She also tackled ‘lies’ about Harris, who has been the subject of conspiracy theories and false claims from Trump.
‘You’re probably already hearing all sorts of lies about Kamala,’ she told an event in Yuma on Friday night. She went on to describe Harris’ work as California attorney general, senator and vice president.
Trump has falsely accused Harris of lying about working at McDonalds as a teenager and has misrepresented the role she played in the Biden administration’s work on border security.
Jill Biden painted a more compassionate picture of the Democratic presidential nominee, talking about her work in fighting crime as an attorney general and how she helped a friend in high school who lived in an abuse situation.
‘That’s the Kamala Harris I know – a quick, tough, compassionate, decisive leader, and that’s the kind of President you deserve Arizona,’ she said.
And Biden repeatedly attacked Trump for his role in appointing Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe vs. Wade.
‘Donald Trump’s abortion ban has taken away that ability for women to make their own health care decisions,’ she said.
‘No one has to abandon their faith or their deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling women what to do with their bodies.’
In addition to the first lady, the Harris campaign has sent running mate Tim Walz and second gentleman Doug Emhoff to Arizona.
Harris spent Thursday and Friday in the Phoenix area, where she also emphasized the fight for abortion rights.
Early voting has begun in Arizona and the first lady reminded people that President Biden only won the state by 10,457 votes in the 2020 contest.
In Phoenix on Saturday morning, she spoke to a group of educators going out to canvass for votes and she reminded them that every vote counts.
‘You know the first time I voted I almost didn’t vote for my future husband. It’s true. Can you imagine if I hadn’t? I mean, thank God I did,’ she said.
She noted she was a student at the University of Delaware at the time and Joe Biden was running for senator.
‘Actually, Joe won that election by only 3000 votes, so it could have easily gone the other way,’ she said.
This is Jill Biden’s fourth time in Arizona this year but her first appearance for Kamala Harris.
She started a campaign swing for the Democratic nominee on Friday in Yuma, Arizona.
She’ll be in Carson City and Reno, Nevada, on Sunday while she’ll spend Monday in the Detroit suburbs and in Madison, Wisconsin.
Her trip will wrap up on Tuesday with a stop in her hometown of Philadelphia.