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Rachel Feltman: For Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. The 2024 election is approaching fast, and we’re here to help you prep for your trip to the polls. Over the last few months, Scientific American’s editors have been reporting on how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris approach the science-related policy issues that impact our everyday lives. They’ve been talking to experts on topics like gun violence, health care, immigration, and more to help explain what a Trump or Harris presidency might mean for these issues in the years to come.

Today we’re going to be hearing from a few of those Scientific American editors about what they’ve learned. First up is Tanya Lewis, a senior editor who covers health and medicine, to give us a primer on how the 2024 election could impact reproductive rights.

Tanya Lewis: Trump and Harris have pretty starkly different views and records on this topic.

Trump has had a pretty big impact on abortion access. He’s appointed three Supreme Court justices that helped overturn Roe v. Wade, and that led to abortion bans or [substantial] restrictions in about half of all U.S. states.

[CLIP: Donald Trump speaks at September’s presidential debate: “We’ve gotten what everybody wanted: Democrats, Republicans and everybody else, and every legal scholar, wanted it to be brought back into the states.”]

Project 2025 is the conservative agenda that Trump has distanced himself from but which was actually written by many of his former colleagues. And that project basically supports the use of the Comstock Act to roll back abortion rights. It also calls for reporting data on individual pregnancies and abortions to the U.S. government.

Abortion bans actually affect things like routine pregnancy care or emergency care. There are already women who are dying because of miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies. Doctors [in some states] are scared of actually acting in these cases because they are afraid that they’re gonna face criminal charges.

Trump has falsely claimed that Harris supports abortion “after birth,” but that’s actually a meaningless term because abortion is not a legal thing that can happen after birth anywhere in this country.

Harris’s campaign has been much more focused on supporting reproductive rights, including abortion. The Biden-Harris administration actually signed several executive orders that protect abortion and abortion medication. The Biden-Harris administration has defended abortion access in a couple of different Supreme Court cases. One of them involved the approval of mifepristone, the abortion medication, by the [Food and Drug Administration], and another one involved emergency abortion care in Idaho.

The Biden-Harris administration expanded coverage of abortion-related travel and access to birth control under Medicaid, the government insurance program for low-income individuals. Harris has vowed to sign legislation that would protect abortion if she’s elected. Now, of course, this is dependent on whether or not Congress passes such legislation, which is somewhat unlikely in this environment.

[CLIP: Kamala Harris speaks at September’s presidential debate: “And I pledge to you, when Congress passes a bill to put back in place the protections of Roe v. Wade, as President of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.”]

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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