Mary Ziegler, the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, is among the most knowledgeable scholars of abortion and the law in the United States. She’s spent her career studying the evolution of reproductive rights and the threats to those rights, and as an author and commentator, she’s spent almost as long explaining the changing situation to American readers.
With abortion rights already removed, restricted or under serious threat across the U.S. in the post-Dobbs era, the Harris-Walz campaign has taken a far more aggressive stance in defense of abortion rights than any previous national Democratic campaign. Harris has also radically changed the Party’s language on abortion, not just placing it at the center of her messaging, but framing it in the context of the most basic American freedoms.
To understand the Harris campaign’s strategy, what it might be doing better, and how it’s efforts might pay off in the short and long term, we reached out to Ziegler to understand the evolving legal battles around abortion at the federal level and in the states, and to get her take on Harris’s messaging and actions so far, to dig into the details what Harris has said as a candidate, and for some insight into what a President Harris might achieve, whether the election brings the worst-case scenario or the best.
UNBURDENED is The Ink’s interview series named after Vice President Harris’s catchphrase, where we ask some of the smartest policy minds out there to envision a bold, aggressive Harris agenda to materially improve people’s lives — unburdened by what has been.
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In a New York Times op-ed last month, you wrote that the Democrats still needed to do better on abortion rights. Do you think Kamala Harris has done enough to change that since?
I think the challenge for the Democrats is to explain what could happen, what Donald Trump could do through executive power and has been avoiding discussing, in a way that’s not too technical and in the weeds for most Americans to understand. But the way Harris was talking about it at the convention and has been talking about it since has focused on how Donald Trump wants to have an abortion ban with or without Congress, which was a nod to the things Trump could do through executive power. And I think that’s about as well as you can do with it.
I still don’t think there’s been enough talk about what Trump judges could do, beyond what Trump judges have already done. But I do think there’s been at least more of an effort to talk about executive power in a way that’s relatable to voters. So even though I wrote what I wrote I do think it’s been better.
And the Republicans have been trying to muddy the waters with complexity: “A ban? No, what ban? Well, what is a ban anyway? 15 weeks, 6 weeks? What does it matter? Comstock Act? Never heard of it.”
They just cite the statutory code in Project 2025. And they expect that most Americans don’t know what the hell that means.
And they’re not wrong.
It’s true. They don’t. In this kind of information environment. It is very difficult to talk about this issue, which is very personal and physical, and people can feel it.
What do you make of how Harris has been putting abortion in the frame of freedom, contextualizing the message on abortion rights as about freedom?
This post was originally published on The.Ink.