Harris Releases Ad Targeting Trump for Helping Overturn Roe v. Wade

Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign released a TV advertisement on Saturday reminding voters that former President Donald J. Trump has taken credit for helping overturn Roe v. Wade, and targeting the growing share of voters who say that abortion is their top issue.

The new 30-second ad will appear on broadcast and cable networks in seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — and in Nebraska’s competitive Second Congressional District, the campaign said. It is part of a broader $370 million advertising blitz by the Harris campaign, which said it had not determined how much it would spend to broadcast the abortion spot.

Over ominous music, the ad opens with a clip of Mr. Trump saying in 2016 that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who seek abortions. It then shows him saying this year that for “years, they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated and I did it, and I’m proud to have done it.”

The narrator then says that Mr. Trump “wants to go further, with plans to restrict birth control, ban abortion nationwide, even monitor women’s pregnancies.”

Mr. Trump’s 2016 statement about “punishment,” made in a forum with Chris Matthews of MSNBC, was almost immediately seen as a gaffe from a candidate new to politics, and Mr. Trump reversed himself within hours.

But he has repeatedly expressed pride in appointing three Supreme Court justices who voted in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and leading to bans or restrictions in 22 states.