Biden ad blames Trump for trauma to abortion-seeker
President Joe Biden's reelection campaign Monday released a searing campaign ad blaming former President Donald Trump for the neardeath of a Texas woman who suffered infections after she was denied an abortion following a miscarriage.
The ad, in which the woman, Amanda Zurawski, sobs about the loss of the baby she and her husband had wanted to name Willow, describes the infection that nearly killed her be- cause of the Texas law that prohibits abortions even when they are medically necessary.
Viewers then see a black screen with a single phrase: “Donald Trump did this.”
The ad encapsulates the strategy by Biden's campaign to seize on anger about the Supreme Court's decision in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, the legal precedent that had protected the right of women to have abortions for nearly a half century.
The president's advisers believe angry voters will blame Trump for the court decision — and the subsequent actions by conservative legislatures to impose severe limits on abortions in several states — when they vote in November. The issue has been central in several recent Democratic election victories.
“The only reason extreme abortion bans are now in effect all over the country are because of judges the previous president and Senate Republicans put in the court,” White House press secretary Karine JeanPierre told reporters Monday.
Trump has for months refused to say whether he supports restrictive measures
such as the one in Texas or a recent Florida ban on all abortions after six weeks, a period before many women even know they are pregnant.
But in a video released Monday, the former president said that such decisions should be left up to the states and that he was “proudly the person responsible” for appointing three justices to the Supreme Court who voted with the majority to overturn Roe.
The ad featuring Zurawski and her husband is part of a $30 million ad campaign and will appear on broadcast and cable stations in battleground states.
Zurawski is suing the state of Texas after she was denied an abortion when her water broke at 18 weeks. She developed sepsis and said she nearly died from the infection. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, which argued the case for Roe before the Supreme Court, 21 more women have joined as plaintiffs in that lawsuit.
The case is being reviewed by the Texas Supreme Court.
Zurawski was a guest at the president's State of the Union address and participated in an event focused on reproductive rights with him in January. She said she would be traveling to North Carolina and Wisconsin in the coming days to campaign for Biden.
In the ad, which was filmed in March, Zurawski, 37, and her husband, Josh, sift through a box of keepsakes from her pregnancy. The infection she developed while pregnant may complicate her ability to have children in the future.
“I think this ad really shows a different side of the coin that Josh and I deal with every day, which is heartbreak and trauma,” she said. “Yes, we are continuing to do this because it's so massively important to us. But it is so hard and so exhausting to keep doing this. That's why I'm like, we've got to win in November, so that I can take a break.”