Nia-Malika Henderson: Democrats made abortion personal. Trump has no rebuttal.

What is so beautiful about a child having to carry her parent’s child?

This question prompted gasps from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and likely a similar reaction from the millions of Americans who watched Vice President Kamala Harris’ nominating convention on the opening night.

It came from a courageous Kentucky woman named Hadley Duvall, who was raped and impregnated by her stepfather when she was 12 years old. And it was directed at former President Donald Trump, who has called the country’s patchwork of abortion laws, some very draconian, “a beautiful thing to watch.”

Trump, of course, has no answer for Duvall’s searing question, variations of which could be asked by the one-third of American women of reproductive age (15-49) who live in states with near-total abortion bans. And Democrats, in showcasing deeply personal abortion stories like Duvall’s, have effectively painted Trump and his GOP allies as glib, dismissive and callous. In clinging to the states’ rights argument around abortion, Trump has left decisions about the basic human rights of one in three American women to the whims of voters.

In an interview Monday, Trump said he has “no regrets” about the end of Roe v. Wade.

“The federal government should have nothing to do with this issue, and it’s been solved at a state level and people are very happy about it,” Trump falsely claimed on CBS News. “I did something that most people felt undoable. They didn’t want it in the federal government. It shouldn’t be in the halls of the federal government. It should be in the state governments and I was able to bring it back to the state government and now people are voting.”

He is right, people are voting. And when they have voted, abortion rights have won, even in deep-red states like Ohio and Kentucky. In November, more than half a dozen states will have abortion-rights measures on the ballot, including in Arizona and Nevada, key swing states.

Democrats have shown that the most powerful political messengers are women themselves, but increasingly men, too. At the convention, Amanda Zurawski was joined by her husband, Josh, who spoke of his grief over their lost child, but also the fear of possibly losing his wife. Male governors, like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, have found their voices on this issue, proudly standing with women and young girls. Having male governors from red states speak so plainly about an issue that Democrats once tiptoed around, shows how far the party has come. It’s no longer the party where abortions are “safe, legal and rare,” in former President Bill Clinton’s phrase. It’s now the party of Hillary Clinton, who was on the vanguard of Democrats’ defense of abortion rights, and of Cooper and Beshear, who spoke frankly about abortion rights in his convention speech.

“All women should have the freedom to make their own decisions,” Beshear said, following Duvall, who was featured in one of his campaign ads. “Freedom over their own bodies. Freedom about whether to pursue IVF. Freedom about whether to have children at all.”

Paging Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance, who in 2021 said that pregnancy through rape was merely an “inconvenient” circumstance.

“The question really to me is about the baby. We want women to have opportunities. We want women to have choices. But above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have the right to life,” Vance said. “Right now, our society doesn’t afford that. I think it’s a tragedy, and I think we can do better.”

It is a notable and necessary shift that many of the most ardent supporters of abortion rights are Democratic men, who have pointed to the ridiculous and harmful statements made by their Republican counterparts.

Democrats have smartly sought to broaden the language around abortion, preferring the phrase “reproductive rights.” Harris’ campaign theme song, Beyonce’s “Freedom” now doubles as a rallying cry for abortion rights.

Trump, who is a master at creating his own reality through repetition and bringing his followers along, can’t conjure a new reality on abortion. No matter how often he says people are happy with his states’ rights approach to basic human rights, it won’t make it true. Vance can say “normal” suburban women don’t care about a majority rules, state-by-state approach to abortion, but he is wrong. Suburban women and men do care. They know that little girls like Hadley Duvall exist all over the country. They know that pregnancy is a medical condition with health and economic implications. And reducing 23 million women to their wombs is not the right answer.

Nia-Malika Henderson is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former senior political reporter for CNN and the Washington Post, she has covered politics and campaigns for almost two decades.