AN OLD AD has been edited and re-shared online to falsely suggest that it is a new campaign ad for US presidential candidate Kamala Harris about a “mother who wishes she had an abortion”.

The ad, which shows a child dance through a house, trashing rooms and spilling paint as they go, was originally for home insurance.

The video was produced for John Lewis Home Insurance, although it was later pulled in 2021 after it was found to be “potentially misleading” after a finding that the company’s standard insurance wouldn’t cover the damage featured in the video.

“DISTURBING: New Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Depicts Mother Who Wishes She Had An Abortion,” a post on Facebook from 2 October reads.

“Please tell me we don’t have a VP [Vice President] wishing this on a pre-teen in a commercial!” says another post with the same manipulated ad, published on Instagram on 2 October.

The video opens on a parent’s bedroom in a state of disarray before panning to show a child wearing their parent’s dress, makeup, and jewellery.

As an instrumental version of the Stevie Nicks’s song Edge of Seventeen plays, the child goes through the house, knocking over lights and decorations, pushing their sister’s paint set off the table and smearing their face with the pigment in their hands, before spilling a drink on a laptop, and gleefully tossing glitter around the kitchen.

In one shot, a woman reading at a table — presumably the child’s mother — looks up at what is happening, dumbstruck.

The video included in the posts has been edited to show a “Harris/Walz” flag in the top left corner. Tim Walz is the current Governor of Minnesota and Kamala Harris’s running mate for vice-president.

The manipulated video also features a voiceover, seemingly belonging to Kamala Harris, talking about abortion bans in the United States and how they have forced women into motherhood when they are not ready.

While Harris has been on record as being strongly in favour of abortion rights, searches for phrases from the voiceover do not reveal a source for this quote, and it is unclear if it was ever spoken or written by Harris.

In either case, the ad was not produced or published by the Harris campaign and the Harris/Walz logo on the top-left of the edited video obscures the John Lewis Home Insurance logo that had appeared in the original.

The original ad also has the original Stevie Nicks vocal line instead of the abortion voiceover (though Stevie Nicks is also a proponent of abortion rights).

The original ad also features extra shots of the child jumping backward onto a couch as the ad’s slogan, “Let Life Happen”, appears on-screen.

Misinformation about Kamala Harris has been rife in recent weeks as the US presidential election approaches, including doctored images of her with Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs that were shared last month by her opponent, former President Donald Trump.

The Journal has previously debunked claims that Harris was not legitimately African-American and a picture (AI-generated) showing her wearing communist attire.

A campaign spreading claims that she had covered-up a hit-and-run that left a child paralysed has since been traced to a Russia-affiliated disinformation group.

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