Following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade that morning, U.S. President Joe Biden urged Congress to include access to abortion in federal law in a press conference on Friday.
Biden referred to the court’s ruling as a “tragic error” since it sent the decision on abortion laws back to the states.
Additionally, he declared that he had ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to provide access to abortion medicines and that he would “do everything in my power” to safeguard women who were traveling to get abortions.
“It’s a sad day for the court and for the country,” Biden, the nation’s second Catholic president, said June 24.
Calling abortion an “intensely personal decision,” Biden went on to lament that the decision had taken away women’s “right to choose” and the “power to control their own destiny.” He claimed that with Roe gone, the “life and health” of women in the United States is now “at risk.”
Despite the Catholic Church’s teaching that abortion is a “grave evil,” Biden has consistently stated his support for Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that made the procedure lawful nationally.
“I believe Roe v. Wade was the correct decision,” Biden stated, claiming that Roe represented a “broad national consensus” relating to the “fundamental right to privacy” that “most Americans of faith…found acceptable.”
Despite evidence to the contrary, a January Knights of Columbus/Marist Poll survey found that more than 60% of all Americans disapproved of Roe v. Wade’s main conclusion.
“This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law,” Biden continued, claiming that “the court has done what it has never done before, expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans and had already been recognized. The court’s decision to do so will have real and immediate consequences.”
“It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.”
The only way to “secure a women’s right to choose,” Biden said, is for Congress to restore Roe as federal law, adding that “executive action can’t do that.” He urged the election of pro-choice legislators in the fall midterm elections.
Biden stated that he intends to provide aid to women living in pro-life states who want to travel to pro-abortion states. “If any state or local official, high or low, tries to interfere with a woman’s exercising her basic right to travel, I will do everything in my power to fight that deeply un-American attack,” Biden said.
The president also said he had directed the Department of Health and Human Services to “take steps” to ensure that mifepristone, the first drug in medical abortion regimen, is “available to the fullest extent possible.”
Supporters of abortion have cited medical abortions as a type of workaround or backup plan for women to access abortion as states ban abortion, despite the fact that these procedures have been connected to a number of health hazards. The most recent Abortion Surveillance report from the US Centers for Disease Control shows that 42.3 percent of abortions in 2019 were “early medical abortions.”
Biden urged those who were angered by the choice to refrain from violence. This occurs in response to a number of recent instances of vandalism against pro-life pregnancy centers across the nation, which the White House strongly condemned through a spokeswoman on June 15.
“I call on everyone no matter how deeply they care about this decision to keep all protests peaceful. Peaceful. Peaceful. Peaceful. No intimidation. Violence is never acceptable. Threats and intimidation are not speech. We must stand against violence in any form regardless of your rationale,” Biden said Friday.
Despite the fact that the United States was previously one of only a small number of nations — including China and North Korea — that permitted elective abortions after 20 weeks of gestation, Biden claimed in his conclusion that the decision to overturn Roe had “made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world.” 47 of the 50 European nations, independent states, and regions that were examined in 2014 either forbade elective abortion or restricted it to 15 weeks or earlier.