Avery Trufelman

Because she’s never been afraid to fight for our right to choose

Sometimes, I escort at an abortion clinic, where I serve as a human buffer between taciturn, tired patients in their pajamas, and protesters who hold up grotesque pictures of rubbery, mutilated babies out of a grind-house movie. They wail and cry and beg, then turn and yell that we are all going to burn in eternal hellfire. It’s extremely depressing. Admittedly, I haven’t done my escorting in a while. The experience always makes me sad for many days after, and most weekends I simply don’t feel strong enough for it. This clinic is just as awful as any clinic anywhere in this country, but the difference is that, in this clinic, the interaction is squeezed to the width of the sidewalk. Even here, in New York City, a bastion of liberalism where abortion is legal, we too need a president like Kamala Harris.

Vice President Harris knows what this depressing scene is like. In March 2024, she made headlines when she became the first sitting vice president to ever visit an abortion clinic. After Biden’s 2024 State of the Union (in which the devoutly Catholic president did not once utter the word “abortion”), the vice president toured a Planned Parenthood facility in Minnesota. There, she was joined by Governor Tim Walz, who, the previous year, had signed a bill enshrining abortion access as a “fundamental right” across the state. Harris and Walz have been, and will remain, unafraid to fight for an issue that affects the lives and livelihoods of millions of Americans, and directly impacts the health and well-being of our future.

Months after Donald Trump helped overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, Harris traveled around the US, talking plainly and boldly about abortion rights (using the actual a-word!), and her team assembled a spreadsheet of allies, power brokers, and delegates to call on when, as Harris feared, Trump would restrict birth control and IVF.

Can you imagine?

Harris has spent years loudly urging her own party to make abortion access part of their core message, and to stop shying away from an issue they have long deemed too controversial. Democrats’ continued ambivalence toward this pressing issue has been just as dangerous as the Republicans’ outright opposition. Long before Roe was overturned, long before I was born, abortion had already become functionally unattainable for low-income Americans. The Hyde Amendment, passed in 1976, prohibits federal insurance money to be put toward abortion care. This means that for forty-eight years, neither Medicaid nor any public funds have ever paid for an abortion. The Hyde Amendment turned a necessary form of health care into a luxury for the wealthy, and it was passed thanks to Democrats who were looking for a peace offering—a token of bipartisanship and goodwill. How fucked up is that? Poor, pregnant Americans were offered up as a bargaining chip, because their representatives were too chickenshit to advocate for them.

Admittedly, at this point, we know precious little about Vice President Harris’s other policy plans. But what I do know is that Kamala Harris will be able to defend women and pregnant people. Certainly more effectively than I ever could, with only the buffer of my body.

Avery Trufelman is the host and producer of the podcast Articles of Interest.