Project 2025 contributor: Kamala Harris “resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South” for supporting access to abortion

Special Programs Abortion Rights & Reproductive Health

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published

Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation official who has played a key role in Project 2025, previously attacked Vice President Kamala Harris as someone who “resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South” because she supports access to abortion. 

Von Spakovsky is a Heritage senior fellow who regularly appears in right-wing media. He is also, as ProPublica has documented, “a leading purveyor of the notion that voter fraud is rampant, claims that have been largely discredited.” 

Von Spakovsky is a significant figure in Heritage’s push for Project 2025, the Heritage-backed and Trump-connected extremist plan to guide staffing and policy priorities for the next Republican administration. He authored a chapter of Project 2025 about the Federal Election Commission and has frequently appeared in the media to promote the project. 

Media Matters has documented Project 2025’s extreme agenda for reproductive rights and numerous other key issues, like immigration and civil liberties. 

During a July 18, 2022, speech to the NAACP, Harris said, “We know, NAACP, that our country has a history of claiming ownership over human bodies. And today, extremists, so-called leaders are criminalizing doctors and punishing women for making healthcare decisions for themselves.” 

That set off von Spakovsky, who repeatedly said that in fact it was Harris who’s been acting like “slave owners.” He co-authored an opinion piece for Daily Caller with Heritage senior legal fellow Sarah Parshall Perry, which was cross-posted on Heritage's site. The piece claimed, “It is abortion supporters like Harris who deny the humanity of developing babies, just as slave owners denied the humanity of the men, women and children they owned. It is abortion supporters like Harris who believe that developing babies are property.” 

From their piece: 

It is abortion supporters like Harris who deny the humanity of developing babies, just as slave owners denied the humanity of the men, women and children they owned. It is abortion supporters like Harris who believe that developing babies are property that can be disposed of based on, as she says, “the personal decision” of a woman, one that is “her right to make.”

How is that any different than the attitude of slave owners who treated their slaves like chattel and claimed that it was their right to dispose of them as they willed?

Answer: It’s not.

What is also astonishing is the reverence with which liberals like Harris treat Roe v. Wade, a decision that resulted in the deaths of literally millions of babies, a disproportionate number of which were African American and Latino. In fact, Roe v. Wade should really be regarded as the modern equivalent of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the infamous Supreme Court decision by Chief Justice Roger Taney in 1857 that denied Dred Scott his freedom.

African-Americans, said Taney, were “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens” protected by the Constitution. And Roe v. Wade said much the same thing: that the life developing in a mother’s womb deserved no protection under the Constitution.

… 

At the NAACP’s convention, Harris, the first woman and first person of color to serve as vice president, spoke of economic inequities that still fall disproportionately on black communities and women.

What she failed to acknowledge is that, without the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe, many future female and African-American leaders might never have been born in the first place.

He also appeared on a radio program on July 25, 2022, and said: “If there's anyone who resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South, it's Kamala Harris and her compatriots who all support basically abortion with no limit.”

HANS VON SPAKOVSKY: Last week, she gave a speech to the NAACP annual convention in Atlantic City, and she compared pro-lifers, she compared the justices of Supreme Court to slave owners saying that they were just the same as slave owners back when some people thought that they could own another human being. And the problem with her historical analogy is she got it exactly reversed. Because it's people who are in favor of abortion who deny the basic humanity of developing life in the womb the same way slave owners denied the basic humanity of the men, women, and children that they owned. So, I mean, if there's anyone who resembles in attitude the slave owners of the old South, it's Kamala Harris and her compatriots who all support basically abortion with no limit.

The GOP and its right-wing media allies have frequently misled about Democrats' stance on abortion, saying that they support abortion “up to the moment of birth,” a claim that has been repeatedly debunked.

The comparison between slavery and support for abortion access has been made repeatedly in right-wing media. Media Matters recently documented that Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), former President Donald Trump’s running mate, appeared on a right-wing anti-abortion radio program in 2022 and, after being prompted, compared Roe v. Wade to the Dred Scott decision allowing slavery.