Kamala Harris has decided, likely as a result of prodding from some very nervous handlers, that she should finally visit the border. 

The Border Czarina, who refuses to accept the title thrust upon her by her current boss, has skirted around an issue that will be central in the upcoming election. She even laughed when Lester Holt reminded her in a televised interview that she had not gone down to see what was happening in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and her home state of California, the one where she was AG and allegedly “prosecuted transnational drug traffickers.” Her pithy reply was “well I’ve never been to Europe, either.” 

As an immigration practitioner who has been to the border, thanks to the support of Americans for Prosperity and Broad + Liberty, I can tell you that it doesn’t look very much like Europe. It looks more like Afghanistan in its final days, with desperate refugees and overworked Americans trying to figure out how to handle the growing mass of humanity. 

I take no pleasure in admitting that there is chaos down there, as someone who has worked in the field for almost three decades. But we have to be honest if we want to solve the problems, problems which are bipartisan in nature but which have increased under the Biden-Harris administration. Yes, Republicans have failed to arrive at a solution which balances common sense, national security and compliance with international human rights treaties. But for the last four years, the Democrats have been in control, and we have seen the results.

So again, Kamala is considering a trip below the Mason-Dixon. That’s nice, and the fact that it comes less than 50 days before an election which will serve in part as a referendum on her performance as the Border Czarina is completely irrelevant. In other words, nothing to see here, move on.

The fact that she has taken this long to address the problem only underlines the outsized importance she has placed on an issue that was never supposed to be her area of specialty but which she embraced with unseemly passion: abortion rights. Harris might not have visited the border, but she is the first Vice President and presidential candidate to have visited an abortion clinic. 

Let me repeat that: Kamala Harris is the only presidential candidate in history to have visited a place where its only purpose is to help women end their pregnancies. And she and her supporters are quite proud of that fact.

This is an example of how radical the Democratic candidate is on an issue that, while admittedly important to progressive women and somewhat less important to those in the center, has deeply divided the nation. Conservative women like this writer have long believed that the status of the law under Roe v. Wade went far beyond what most Americans believed was humane. The United States, under Roe, provided greater access to abortion at later stages of pregnancy than any other civilized country in the world. Conservative women saw that, and worked long and hard for decades to eliminate that precedent. We were successful with Dobbs, but we perhaps underestimated the reaction that it would trigger in those like Harris who are deeply wedded to the abortion industry.

Abortion has become, along with immigration, a flashpoint in this election. There has been misrepresentation and dishonesty with both issues, including the rather ridiculous obsessing with pet-eating Haitians. It didn’t happen, and it shouldn’t have even been the focus of a two minute joke, let alone an entire week’s discussion on cable news.

But the misinformation and deliberate lies with respect to abortion are even more galling. Harris and her supporters have used the tragic death of a woman who died after taking the abortion pill to attack what they dishonestly call “Trump’s Abortion Ban.” 

The facts are these: The woman was pregnant with twins and waited until late in her pregnancy to seek termination. She obtained the abortion pill from an abortion clinic, which did not monitor her health but acted simply as a distributor, and when she developed complications and went to a hospital for a D & C, she was attended. Sadly, the doctors were not able to save her life, and there is no actual indication that if they had intervened at an earlier stage instead of monitoring her condition and blood pressure, that she would have survived. She essentially died of sepsis, which had set in because she had not evacuated all of the fetuses after taking the pill.

The abortion rights lobby has tried to frame this as doctors who were too afraid to operate on her because of Georgia’s so-called “abortion ban.” There is no confirmation that this is what happened, but it’s a convenient narrative for those who haven’t read Dobbs, didn’t understand Roe and come up with empty phrases like “Trump’s Abortion Ban.” Trump issued no ban. Neither did the Supreme Court. It simply returned the issue where it belongs, to the states.

Every time I see a political ad exploiting the death of this poor mother, or using a teenager who was impregnated by her criminal stepfather in order to MAGA (“Make Abortion Great Again,”) I tremble with anger at the dishonesty. And when I consider that the woman who wants to be president is enabling these fallacies, I am not surprised that she prefers visiting abortion clinics to the chaos that she, in large part, helped create. 

Christine Flowers is an attorney and lifelong Philadelphian. @flowerlady61

This piece was originally published in the Delco Daily Times.