In April 2004, Kamala Harris was less than four months into her new job as San Francisco’s district attorney, a high-profile position that thrust her into the local headlines, when she flew to Washington, D.C., to become one face in a sea of more than a million.
People from around the country descended on the National Mall for the March for Women’s Lives, organized by groups including Planned Parenthood and the National Organization for Women, to call for the protection and expansion of reproductive health care, including abortion rights.
Ms. Harris traveled with about 30 female Bay Area leaders, including Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire philanthropist, and Susie Tompkins Buell, the founder of the Esprit clothing brand and the North Face outdoor recreation-wear company. They were there primarily to protest President George W. Bush’s signing of a bill that outlawed abortions late in pregnancy, typically after 20 weeks, and allowed criminal prosecutions of doctors who performed them. The women said that the president was politicizing a matter of personal health.
Twenty years later, Vice President Harris has made abortion rights — an issue that has benefited Democrats around the country since the Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022 — a centerpiece of her campaign for the presidency.
While some Democrats, including President Biden, have become far more outspoken about abortion rights since the fall of Roe v. Wade, interviews with friends and former associates of Ms. Harris, and a review of her work as a prosecutor, show that she has been publicly passionate about the issue for decades. For a politician who has been criticized for wavering and flipping on some issues, this is one area, former associates say, where her conviction has always been clear.
“It was always a given,” said Ms. Tompkins Buell in an interview, recalling that at the 2004 march, Ms. Harris warned the women in their “posse,” as they called it, that they could not take their reproductive freedoms for granted.
“There are many other issues where she would weigh many different perspectives and bring her pragmatic approach,” said David Chiu, the San Francisco city attorney, who has known Ms. Harris for over 25 years. But, he continued, “on issues impinging on a woman’s reproductive freedoms and bodily autonomy and safety, she’s never brokered any compromise.”
He recalled that one of her earliest public expressions of these views as an elected official was when she opposed ballot measures in 2006 and 2008 to require parental consent for minors seeking abortions. Voters rejected both measures.
Mr. Chiu attributed Ms. Harris’s commitment to her background as the daughter of a scientist who researched breast cancer and to her work as a prosecutor.
“Her entire career, before she became an elected official, was standing up for women who had been victimized, brutalized, raped or otherwise attacked, and I think standing up for women’s reproductive health rights stems out of those values,” he said.
One such case involved the stabbing murder in 2000 of a woman, Claire Tempongko, in front of her children, ages 5 and 10, by her former boyfriend, Tari Ramirez. The case jolted San Francisco and revealed major gaps in the city’s domestic violence response.
On the stand, Mr. Ramirez said he had flown into a rage when Ms. Tempongko told him she had had an abortion without his knowledge.
“There was an audible gasp in the courtroom,” recalled Beverly Upton, executive director of the San Francisco Domestic Violence Consortium.
Mr. Ramirez was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to 16 years to life in prison. He was recently released.
Ms. Harris had an assistant district attorney prosecute the case, but she watched the courtroom proceedings regularly and pushed for changes in the city’s domestic violence response because of it. The Foundation for Filipina Women’s Network gave her a Vagina Warrior Award for her work on the case.
Taking on crisis pregnancy centers
Perhaps Ms. Harris’s most public step on abortion rights while California attorney general came in 2015, when she co-sponsored a bill called the Reproductive FACT Act. The bill, passed later that year, required crisis pregnancy centers — often religiously affiliated organizations that oppose abortion and try to persuade women to continue their pregnancies — to post notices informing women of the range of reproductive health services, including abortion, available at public health programs in the state.
In California, bills have sponsors and authors who are legislators, but can also have outside sponsors who take an especially active role in preparing and championing the legislation. It is relatively uncommon for the state’s attorney general to co-sponsora bill, said Mr. Chiu, who was in the State Assembly at the time and was a legislative sponsor of the bill.
He said the bill grew out of an investigation by a reproductive rights organization, which found that crisis pregnancy centers were saying that abortions were linked to adverse health consequences like breast cancer, infertility, miscarriages and depression, linkages that have not been supported by medical evidence.
He said that the organization approached Ms. Harris and she agreed to co-sponsor the bill.
“She made sure that her deputies were very involved in the crafting of the language, and all of us who are working on it were very grateful that she was willing to lend her name and her office to the cause,” Mr. Chiu said. Attorneys in her office tried to help ensure that the bill could survive legal challenges they anticipated from anti-abortion groups, he said, adding that he appreciated “knowing that our bill was heavily vetted by her team. They were careful to make sure that it was well crafted.”
Ms. Harris praised the bill in a public statement when Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law. “I am proud to have cosponsored the Reproductive FACT Act, which ensures that all women have equal access to comprehensive reproductive health care services, and that they have the facts they need to make informed decisions about their health and their lives,” she said.
The law was quickly challenged by crisis pregnancy centers, which sued Ms. Harris in her capacity as attorney general. Her successor, Xavier Becerra, became the defendant in the cases when he became the attorney general in 2017 after Ms. Harris was elected to the United States Senate. Judges at the district court and appellate court levels upheld the law, but in 2018, the Supreme Court sided with pregnancy centers in the case, invalidating the law.
Investigating an anti-abortion activist
As attorney general, Ms. Harris also investigated an anti-abortion activist who in 2015 posted videos that he said showed Planned Parenthood employees in California appearing to discuss illegally selling tissue from aborted fetuses. The activist, David Daleiden, and another activist, Sandra Merritt, had posed as representatives of a biotechnology firm procuring fetal tissue for researchers and secretly filmed the conversations.
The case set off a firestorm of anti-abortion activism against Planned Parenthood. But numerous congressional and state investigations found no indication that Planned Parenthood was selling fetal parts for profit or violating any laws. Abortion providers are legally allowed to share fetal tissue with organizations involved in scientific research and can charge fees to cover their costs.
Ms. Harris authorized agents from the California Department of Justice to search Mr. Daleiden’s home in Orange County in 2016 and seize a laptop and computer hard drives. Mr. Daleiden and anti-abortion groups like Susan B. Anthony List accused Ms. Harris, who was running for the United States Senate at the time, of conducting a biased investigation because of political ties to abortion rights groups.
Evidence from the search provided a basis for criminal charges that were filed against Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt in 2017 by Mr. Becerra, after he succeeded Ms. Harris as attorney general. That case, charging that the recordings violated the state’s privacy law, is scheduled for trial later this year.
(Planned Parenthood also filed a civil suit against Mr. Daleiden and Ms. Merritt, and in 2019, a federal jury awarded the organization more than $2 million in damages. The Supreme Court last year declined to hear an appeal.)
Brokering an agreement with a hospital
In 2013, Ms. Harris’s office began investigating a situation involving a hospital in Orange County that had entered into a partnership with a Catholic health system and decided to stop providing nonemergency or elective abortions.
Investigators looked into allegations that the hospital, Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, would be limiting the women’s health services in order to comply with the values of the Catholic system, St. Joseph Health. Abortion rights advocates and some doctors at Hoag said that the hospital should continue to offer the full range of services, including elective abortions, and complained that the change would prevent women from receiving the best care in all situations.
About a year later, Ms. Harris’s office announced it had reached an agreement with Hoag that would allow it to stop providing elective abortions as long as it helped women find clinics or other providers that would allow them to terminate their pregnancies. The agreement said that for 20 years, Hoag would have to provide all other reproductive health services, including some that might be antithetical to Catholic values, such as tubal ligations and I.U.D. insertions, as well as emergency abortions.
At the march all those years ago, on the National Mall, Ms. Harris’s posse included one tiny member: the infant daughter of Andrea Dew Steele, who organized the trip and toted little Carmen in a baby carrier.
Now, Carmen Dew Steele is taking time off from her studies at George Washington University to work for the Harris campaign, motivated, in part, by a desire to protect abortion rights.
