It matters deeply that America has a woman as our vice president. That has never been truer than at this moment. Nothing makes this more apparent than Vice President Kamala Harris’ courageous decision to champion reproductive freedom amid a full-on assault on the right to choose.
Vice President Harris is currently traveling the country on an extensive Reproductive Freedom Tour. As noted by the New York Times, “The vice president has been the administration’s most forceful voice for abortion rights in the year and a half since Roe v. Wade fell.”
Even among those of us without a uterus, the impact of the vice president’s courage affects many of us personally in our lives.It affects me as a girl dad and a member of this country because the person who shaped me most as an organizer is my grandmother, Mamie Todd, who started her career in social change at Planned Parenthood in Baltimore.
Even though abortion was illegal then, the primary mission was the same: reproductive health and freedom. While the work mainly focused on birth control, education, and some routine health care, it was not without its challenges — especially in a Catholic city in a Catholic state.
By the early 1940s, when my grandmother was doing this work, things had come a long way since 1916 when Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was arrested for opening the nation’s first birth control clinic in Brooklyn.
However, the Comstock Act was still on the books and enforced. That law defined contraceptives as obscene and made it a federal crime to send them through the mail or transport them across state lines.
In the pre-Roe v. Wade era, when abortions were illegal in most parts of this country, many still depended on them. Some required them to extricate themselves from abusive relationships or avoid other dire consequences. Again, at this time the procedure was illegal and risky. Abortions, forced to be conducted in secret, frequently resulted in death or injuries that would leave women unable to bear children.
From 1973 until 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, abortions were safe and legal. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dobbs case has created a flood of laws threatening to send us back to the dark ages. This goes for women who are attempting to sever ties with dangerous men and those in other horrific situations many of us can only imagine.
And it is not stopping. Just this month, the Missouri state Senate voted down two amendments to the state’s medieval abortion laws that would have allowed exceptions for rape and incest.
That’s why Vice President Harris’s leadership is so important. It is easy to imagine that whoever was vice president in these times would be fighting these attacks…that a male with a similarly impressive resume as a litigator and advocate could be a stalwart for this fundamental right.
But the difference is evident when you watch Vice President Harris on the stump, speaking against these laws that would deny freedom to women who find themselves in the situation my mother was in back then. You cannot help but sense that she feels the urgency to help those women in her bones in a way that no man could.
Ben Jealous is a former president and CEO of the NAACP and former executive director of the NNPA. The civil rights leader and environmentalist is currently serving as executive director of the Sierra Club.