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Vice President Kamala Harris is poised to become the Democratic nominee for president, and, undoubtedly, she will present herself as the candidate who will protect "women's health." But Harris' record proves the opposite—she puts women and girls at risk.
In science and medicine, words have specific meanings, and those meanings can, literally, be the difference between life and death. The National Institutes of Health has a policy requiring that sex be considered as a biological variable in research studies because of differences between men and women, such as how they metabolize and react to drugs. The agency's guidelines specify that "Sex is a biological variable defined by characteristics encoded in DNA, such as reproductive organs and other physiological and functional characteristics."
There is one important reason voters can't trust Harris to commit to women's health: her party won't even define what a woman is.
Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Biden-Harris nominee, infamously refused to answer Senator Marsha Blackburn's (R-Tenn.) simple request to define "woman" during her confirmation hearing. Scientists and scholars later tried to provide the nominee with cover by saying she answered correctly, ignoring that even government health agencies offer a definition of biological sex.
Science doesn't struggle with simple definitions the way Justice Brown Jackson did. So where does Harris come down?
It depends on the day and on which audience she's trying to please. At a speech in May, Harris asked the audience "Do we trust women?" But official documents from the Biden-Harris administration instead use the term "birthing people." Which is it? The answer matters—millions of women's lives and billions of dollars in federal health care spending turn on such things.
Beyond rhetoric, the vice president's policies regarding women are notably extreme, especially when placed in global context. U.S. policy under the Biden-Harris administration is an outlier compared with peer nations in its approach to two key women's health issues: transgender treatments for children and late-term abortion. And health care policy is posed to move even further left under a Harris administration.
The Biden-Harris administration's Health and Human Services Department unequivocally supports radical treatments for transgender youth, including puberty blockers, partially reversible hormone blockers in early adolescence, and non-reversible gender reassignment surgeries on "case-by-case" bases in adolescence. In 2021, there were 1,390 children between the ages of 6 and 17 on puberty blockers and 4,231 children on hormone therapy.
This agenda is out of step with the U.S.' peer countries. In May, the United Kingdom government issued an emergency ban on the prescription of puberty blockers to children and adolescents with gender dysphoria, citing risks to patient safety. This decision came after a four-year research review found poor quality in published studies in the field and a lack of long-term follow-up data on hormone blocker use at an earlier age—meaning there is inadequate information regarding patient outcomes.
The U.K. decision aligns with other European countries, five of which now restrict access to hormone treatments for adolescents. And yet, the Biden-Harris administration has shown no such movement to protect young people, including young girls who may be on a path to permanently losing their ability to have kids or breastfeed their babies one day.
Vice President Harris has also refused to condemn late-term abortion. Progressives in the U.S. have advocated in the halls of Congress and in state capitols to allow late-term abortion up until the moment of birth. In the name of women's rights, government health leaders deny the remarkable achievements medicine has made in the 50 years since Roe v. Wade. Surgeons now operate on babies as early as the 16th week of pregnancy. Yet, nine U.S. states plus D.C. currently have laws with no week restrictions—a standard more radical than most of liberal Europe and on par with countries such as China and North Korea.
Most Americans don't support aborting babies in the seventh, eighth, and ninth months of pregnancy. Does Vice President Harris disagree? Her prior support for the Women's Health Protection Act—which has no limits on abortion—is a clue. She's also shown a willingness to gloss over inconvenient facts. The vice president said last year that criticism of her party's support for late-term elective abortion was a "mischaracterization of the point." Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show at least 4,382 abortions beyond 21 weeks occurred in the U.S. in 2020, with evidence of clinics offering elective (not "medically necessary") abortions up to 34 weeks. Yet Harris routinely dodges the issue.
Harris' radical policies—which go far beyond even generally progressive Europe—are a drastic, ironic indicator of how the potential first female president would govern on women's health issues.
To truly protect women, officials need to both define and defend them. Harris and her party do neither. American women, girls, and babies deserve more.
Heidi Overton, M.D., Ph.D., is the Chief Policy Officer and Vice Chair of the Center for a Healthy America at the America First Policy Institute. She is board-certified in Preventive Medicine and General Public Health.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
