Melinda French Gates’s New Life: Abortion Politics and Kamala Harris

When Melinda French Gates was running the world’s biggest philanthropy with her husband, Bill Gates, she insisted on staying on the sidelines of politics. She was half of one of America’s most celebrated couples, and she did not want to invite backlash from governments around the globe, to say nothing of getting crosswise with Washington by endorsing someone who could lose.

Then, in 2021, that well-ordered life blew up.

Her divorce from Mr. Gates was a bombshell — and its consequences still ripple three years later. She suddenly came into her own billions of dollars, with which she could do whatever she chose. This year, she decided to resign from her namesake foundation, which meant she could set her own agenda. And, after decades of carefully scripted neutrality, she did what she had wanted to do ever since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade: She dove headfirst into politics.

At 60, Ms. French Gates has reinvented herself, surprisingly, as an ascendant Democratic megadonor. She has endorsed political candidates, given more than $13 million to groups supporting Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, had her team talk to Ms. Harris’s advisers about a joint event, and publicly championed abortion rights, an issue she downplayed for decades because it was too politically fraught.

Ms. French Gates’s transformation, people close to her say, is due less to a eureka moment and more to a response to the changing circumstances in her home and in the world. Her split from Mr. Gates and the foundation gave her independence, and the overturning of Roe spurred her to act.

“Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own,” she said in a brief interview last month. She