The Young Woman Making Kamala Harris’ Strongest Case on Abortion Rights

The day after Labor Day, swing-state polls were showing Donald Trump and Kamala Harris locked in a “dogfight” or a “showdown” or even a “knife fight in a phone booth,” depending on the news outlet. That morning, a young Harris surrogate named Hadley Duvall was in the battleground state of Arizona, having breakfast with some staffers, looking friendly and serene. She’d been deployed there — as she has to several swing states since delivering a stunning speech to the Democratic National Convention — to tell her story as a survivor of incest.

Three times that day, she would repeat matter-of-factly, in front of different sets of strangers far from her Kentucky home, a secret she’d kept for 10 years as a child. “From the age of five years old,” she would say, “I was sexually abused by my stepfather at the time. When I was 12, I was impregnated from him.” She would explain being told, with Roe v. Wade then still in effect, that she had options and would have had an abortion had she not miscarried. In three different rooms in three different towns, she would offer proof that debates over abortion restrictions, especially ones like Arizona’s that prohibit the procedure after 15 weeks with no exceptions for rape or incest, are not abstract or theoretical exercises.