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Trump 'Is the Architect of This Crisis,' Says Harris of Women Killed by Abortion Bans
"He is proud? Proud that women are dying?" said the vice president. "Proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care?"
Sep 20, 2024
Speaking at a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia on Friday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris paid tribute to two women from the state whose deaths have been deemed by health experts as "preventable" and the result of the state's six-week abortion ban.
Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, said the Democratic presidential candidate, are doubtlessly just two of many people who have died because they couldn't access abortion care since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade—and she blamed former Republican President Donald Trump for their deaths.
"This is a healthcare crisis and Donald Trump is the architect of this crisis," said Harris. "He brags about overturning Roe v. Wade. In his own words, quote, 'I did it and I'm proud to have done it.'"
"He is proud? Proud that women are dying?" she said. "Proud that doctors and nurses could be thrown in prison for administering care? Proud that today, young women have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers? How dare he."
Harris shared the stories, reported on this week by ProPublica, of Thurman and Miller, who both died in 2022 after medication abortions did not entirely expel the fetal tissue from their pregnancies.
Thurman spent 20 hours in a hospital growing increasingly sick from sepsis while doctors dangerously delayed performing a dilation and curettage (D&C), a common procedure used for miscarriage and abortion care, due to Georgia's six-week abortion ban. While the ban includes an "exception" to safe the life of a pregnant person, the law's language only makes clear that doctors can perform a D&C for someone having a miscarriage.
The law stopped Miller from seeking healthcare after suffering the same rare complication as Thurman. The mother of three acquired pills for a medication abortion online but did not expel all the fetal tissue and was "bedridden and moaning" for days before her husband found her unresponsive, next to her three-year-old daughter.
Miller's family said she had not sought care "due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions."
At the event on Friday, Harris said that "at least two women—and those are only the stories we know—here in the state of Georgia, died because of a Trump abortion ban."
The vice president noted that Trump said last month he plans to vote against Amendment 4 in his home state of Florida—a ballot measure that would outlaw pre-viability abortion bans in the state.
Harris warned voters not to believe the claims by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), that they don't support making abortion illegal across the nation, a proposal made by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) months after Roe was overturned.
"The stakes are so high," said Harris, "because if he is elected again, I am certain he will sign a national abortion ban."
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Georgia Drops Money Laundering Charges Against 'Stop Cop City' Activists
"From the beginning, we knew these charges were not based on any evidence, but were instead politically motivated and intended to target a social movement," said an opponent of the facility.
Sep 18, 2024
Members of the "Stop Cop City" movement on Tuesday celebrated that Georgia prosecutors are dropping money laundering charges as a "major victory in the ongoing fight against the political repression of forest defenders and activists," but reiterated criticism of the broader case.
"The state has previously claimed that the Atlanta Solidarity Fund is at the center of the alleged criminal enterprise, using the money laundering charges to do so," explained Keyanna Jones, a Stop Cop City activist and co-pastor at Park Avenue Baptist Church, in a statement. "Now, it is admitting that it doesn't have the evidence to prove its allegations, just as it lacks the evidence to prove its case altogether."
A deputy attorney general revealed in court that the state will no longer pursue money laundering charges against Atlanta Solidarity Fund leaders Marlon Kautz, Adele MacLean, and Savannah Patterson, though the trio and 58 other opponents of the DeKalb County law enforcement facility—which remains under construction—still face widely condemned racketeering charges.
As The Associated Press reported:
Just as a motions hearing was about to start Tuesday, Deputy Attorney General John Fowler told Fulton County Judge Kimberly Esmond Adams that he would be filing paperwork to dismiss the 15 counts. A spokesperson for Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment Tuesday afternoon on why the charges were dropped.
But Kristen Novay, the attorney for Patterson, applauded the decision.
"The entire indictment is defective, but with those particular counts, I think it is a wise move for a seasoned prosecutor to say, 'This isn't worth it,'" Novay told The Associated Press. "Sometimes the hardest call as a prosecutor is to not go for something."
Stop Cop City activist Kris Hermes also applauded the development while blasting the state for the remaining charges.
"From the beginning, we knew these charges were not based on any evidence, but were instead politically motivated and intended to target a social movement," said Hermes. "Defeating these bogus charges is a major victory, and the attorney general will ultimately be forced to drop or lose the entire case against Stop Cop City activists."
The news out of the courthouse came after some Cop City protesters disrupted a Monday afternoon Atlanta City Council meeting with chants, pingpong balls, and a banner for the Democratic mayor that read, "Andre Dickens: You dropped the ball on democracy."
The protesters "were demonstrating on the one-year anniversary of submitting 116,000 petition signatures calling for a referendum on the public training facility," according to Atlanta News First.
"While council members are complicit by turning a blind eye to the signatures collected by not evoking the verification process, it has been the mayor's office that has spent an estimate of $1,000,000 on legal fees to withhold the vote from its own tax-paying residents," the protesters said in a statement.
Construction on the 85-acre, $110-million Atlanta Public Safety Training Center—as the facility is formally called—is set to be largely finished by December, despite local opposition.
"To be clear—Cop City is not just a controversial training center," Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders has said. "It is a war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The facility includes shooting ranges, plans for bomb testing, and will practice tear gas deployment. They are practicing how to make sure poor and working-class people stay in line."
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Violent Arrest of Emory Professor Spotlights Brutality of Police Crackdown on Campus Protests
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy," said one foreign policy expert. "And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now."
Apr 26, 2024
Emory University economics professor Caroline Fohlin approached several police officers who were holding a student down on the ground on Thursday and demanded an explanation—but by the end of the day videos of her own arrest became some of the most widely circulated images of the rapidly spreading anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S.
As she knelt down to ask the university officers, "What are you doing?" another law enforcement agent grabbed her arm and pushed her away before repeatedly ordering her to "get on the ground."
"Stop it!" Fohlin yelled before the officer pushed her to the ground and called for more police to help subdue her.
Fohlin then screamed, "Oh my God!" as the police pushed her down and told the police that she was a professor at the university as they held her on the ground.
Fohlin's arrest—after which she was detained for 11 hours and then charged with "battery of a police officer"—came a week after Columbia University suspended more than 100 students for setting up an encampment in solidarity with Gaza, where more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by the U.S.-backed Israel Defense Forces (IDF) since October, and allowed police to arrest them. The mass arrests only served to galvanize students and faculty at Columbia and at dozens of other schools, with more than 400 people being detained so far.
The American Association of University Professors called the arrest "antithetical to the mission of higher education."
"Our institutions exist to foster robust exchanges of ideas and open dialogue in service of knowledge and understanding," said the group. "Sometimes that includes open dissent. Peaceful campus protests should never be met with violence."
Foreign policy expert Trita Parsi suggested that Fohlin's arrest was among the on-campus incidents that have strained the Democratic Party's argument that "democracy is on the ballot in November."
"To sustain this level of blind support for Israel, the U.S. must erode its own democracy. And that is what we see happening on U.S. campuses now," said Parsi, executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, sharing a video of police tasing an Emory student who was already being held down on the ground.
Emil' Keme, a professor of English and Indigenous studies at Emory, told Democracy Now! on Friday that the scene on campus resembled "a war zone," especially after university and Atlanta police deployed tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters.
"I started feeling the tear gas, and I held arms with some people," he said. "We were being pushed back out of the encampment. And the student I was holding arms with, she was then arrested and the next thing I knew I was on the floor and I was being arrested."
Writer Abdullah Shihipar said Emory president Gregory Fenves—and all university administrators who have allowed the arrest of students who have peacefully protested, including several who have unilaterally altered school codes in order to ban protests—should resign.
"It has been a disgusting and embarrassing week for higher education," said Shihipar.
The crackdown on Emory students and faculty came a day after Texas state troopers descended on the University of Texas at Austin campus, some on horseback, and clamped down on a student walkout there, arresting more than 50 protesters.
Also on Thursday, students at Indiana University and Ohio State University (OSU)—where more than 30 and a dozen students were arrested, respectively—reported seeing snipers stationed on the rooftops of campus buildings, which an Ohio State representative denied.
The Biden administration has not directly addressed the protests or their demands since Monday, when President Joe Biden suggested the nationwide student uprising is "antisemitic."
"The use of state violence against peaceful protestors is unacceptable," said Sara Haghdoosti, executive director of Win Without War. "Police batons deployed against students calling for peace in Gaza are not a source of safety on campus, nor are they a bulwark against antisemitism. They hurt people, impinge on fundamental liberties, and serve an extreme right-wing agenda that threatens Jews, Muslims, and the right to protest across the country. University leaders and government officials must take steps to protect students exercising their right to protest, not enlist police to attack them."
"Antisemitism and anti-Muslim bigotry are on the rise and serious issues nationwide, including on college campuses," continued Haghdoosti. "The people endangered by these scourges deserve better than to be the targets of cynical political ploys or to be used as excuses for violent repression. No one is made safer by police violence, and politicians who say otherwise are only attempting to sow division for their own reprehensible ends. What we need from our leaders right now is to de-escalate, permit protests, and not allow state violence against people exercising their fundamental rights."
Irene Khan, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, said Thursday that the protests spreading across the U.S. and internationally are a sign that "the Gaza crisis is truly becoming a global crisis of the freedom of expression."
"Legitimate speech must be protected," Khan said Thursday, "but, unfortunately, there is a hysteria that is taking hold in the U.S."
"We must not mix [antisemitism] up with criticism of Israel as a political entity, as a state," she added. "Criticizing Israel is perfectly legitimate under international law."
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