Vice President Kamala Harris is taking her support for abortion rights on the road. On Monday, Harris kicked off her Reproductive Freedoms Tour, on which she hopes to bring attention to what’s likely going to be a key campaign issue this year.

Before the launch in Wisconsin, where Harris stood in front of a banner that read “TRUST WOMEN” and condemned the “extremists trying to take us backward,” our very own Katie Couric sat down with the VP to get a sneak peek into her plans surrounding abortion rights. “Women around our country are experiencing profound harm because of these laws as a result of that Supreme Court decision,” Harris told Katie. “And many of the stories are untold. Many of these cases are women who are silently suffering.”

The tour is part of a tag-team effort with President Biden, who convened a meeting of his task force on reproductive healthcare access. Together, they hope to target anti-abortion laws that have taken shape since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Kirsten Allen, the vice president’s press secretary, told reporters that Harris has several more stops planned in “states that have enshrined protections, restricted access, and states that continue to threaten access, causing chaos and confusion.” This includes her home state of California, which has become a leader in protecting abortion rights.

Harris made some time ahead of the tour to talk to Katie for an episode of Next Question about her latest initiative and why it could drive voters to the polls in this year’s highly-anticipated election.

Katie Couric: You’re embarking on a reproductive freedom tour to highlight the harm caused by abortion bans and restrictive laws. Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, this is an issue that has resonated so much with Democratic voters. What’s your goal as you travel around the country?

Kamala Harris: Well, my ultimate goal is that we will build up the support to build and get a Congress that will pass a bill to restore the protections of Roe into law. And President Joe Biden will sign it. But let’s take a step back: I’m starting The Fight for Our Reproductive Freedoms tour and it’ll begin on January 22, which is the 51st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. And Katie, for most of our conscious lives, when we were able to be aware of what was happening in the world, Roe v. Wade was the law of the land… And I’ll speak for myself now: I was always pro-choice. But honestly, I think most of us were pretty certain it would always be here. And look what happened: The highest court in our land took a constitutional right that had been recognized from the people of America — from the women of America. And the day that decision came down, the world, in so many ways in terms of a lived experience for the women of America, changed in a drastic way. After the Dobbs decision — which undid Roe — came down, states around our country proposed and passed laws that would punish women, criminalize healthcare providers, and ban abortion, in some cases even in the situation of rape or incest.

As you know, I spent a lot of my career as a prosecutor. One of the reasons I became a prosecutor is that in high school, I learned my best friend was being molested by her stepfather. And when I learned that, I said, “well, you have to come and stay with us.” I called my mother. My mother said, “Of course, she has to come stay with us.” And she did. And so I decided I wanted to do the work that was about protecting women and children from violence. The majority of my career as a prosecutor was focused on crimes against women and children. So bringing that back to the point of “no exception, even for rape or incest”: These extremist so-called leaders are basically saying to a survivor of a crime of violence to their body, a violation of their body, “You don’t have the authority or right to make a decision about what happens to your body next.” That’s immoral. And what I have seen traveling our country, listening to women who have been directly affected because of these laws, is the stories of women having miscarriages in toilets.

Katie, there’s a woman in Texas who I’ve spent some time with. She and her husband wanted to become pregnant. She wanted to have children. She was having a miscarriage, so she went to the emergency room. She was denied care because the hospital workers were so afraid that they might get sued or commit something against the law. It was only when she went back because she had developed sepsis that they gave her care. Women around our country are experiencing profound harm because of these laws as a result of that Supreme Court decision. And many of the stories are untold. Many of these cases are women who are silently suffering.

And the other layer of this, Katie, that really should be addressed and understood, is how these extremists are framing the discussion in a way that really is about judging women as though they’ve done something wrong, something they should be embarrassed about. When people are already going through a moment in their life when they need support, not judgment, and when they then feel because of this environment that they’ve done something wrong, they’re going to silently suffer and they’re going to feel alone, which is very disempowering. When I travel our country, listening to these stories, hearing these women, and thinking about this issue and its effect in real-time, I feel compelled to travel as I’ve been to organize folks and talk with folks about why we all should stand for these basic freedoms, the right of an individual to make decisions about their own body.

Pragmatically speaking, Madam Vice President, the composition of the Supreme Court is unlikely to change any time soon it seems. So what can you realistically do? You were talking about electing people to Congress and passing a federal law protecting a woman’s right to choose in the interim. Are there any other things that can be done to prevent these women from suffering the way they have been, and particularly in very restrictive states like Texas, Idaho, and Tennessee?

Well, I’ll start with what our administration is working on, which includes fighting for and informing states about the responsibility to administer emergency care, and the duty to administer emergency care. There’s a law with the acronym EMTALA [Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act] that says people cannot be denied emergency care. There’s the work that we’re doing to protect access to contraception, which is a real issue here. There’s work I’ve been doing, for example, to convene university presidents who of course have to ensure that they’re doing what they can to protect medical records, to protect privacy, to make allowances, as the vast majority of their student population are in the height of their reproductive years. If, for example, a student has an unwanted pregnancy and can’t receive medical care in their state and needs to leave and miss time from class, to make sure that student is not punished because they had to leave the state even though they would’ve preferred to stay where they were.

The other work involves just talking with people about the realities of it all. For example, pointing out that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling her what to do with her body. If she chooses, she will consult with her priest, her rabbi, her pastor, her imam, but it should not be the government telling her what to do.

So there are many layers to the work that I think needs to be done, including reminding the individuals who are going through this right now, the women who are going through it right now, that they’re not alone, and that we hear them and we see them. We do not judge them, and we want them to have the support that they so rightly need.

I also think there’s a lot of disinformation about late-term abortions.

Oh, absolutely.

As well as misconceptions as to when women are having abortions. People hear horror stories about it happening right before the baby is born. How can you educate the public that even Roe had restrictions on the third trimester?

Let’s remember that before the Dobbs decision, whether women were doing these things that people are now describing as possible partial-birth abortions was not an issue that was being debated. And I just think that it is meant to distract from the realities, which is this — and it’s really basic and fundamental: This is about taking freedoms away, the freedom to make decisions about your own body. This is a question also of trust. I trust women, President Joe Biden trusts women to be able to know what is in their own best interest and then make good decisions. And women trust us to know we’re gonna protect and fight for their freedoms. But fundamentally, that is the issue. And I think many people want to distract from that fundamental foundational issue. [I see it as a] foundational issue because it is one of the main principles upon which our country was founded.

Do you think that this will motivate voters in November?

They can make a difference. This issue — whether women have this freedom or not — will be ultimately determined because of what will result from elections, which is elected leaders passing a law to reinstate the protections of freedom.

But ultimately it’s going to take the federal level because you see different laws that have been unleashed after the Dobbs decision. So we want to go back to the law of the land being Roe. I think that elections matter, Katie, on this issue, in particular, elections, they matter.