Planned Parenthood President Leana Wen said Friday she believes Joe Biden saying he no longer supports a long-standing ban on federal funding for abortion, even though he reversed his stance over the course of 36 hours.
“I take him at his word now that he has heard the will of the people,” Wen said on a C-SPAN interview that will run over the weekend. “It is also our expectation as the Planned Parenthood Action Fund that all candidates would be supporting the right to safe, legal abortion; would regard abortion care to be the standard medical care that it is; would support repealing the Hyde Amendment; and would be in favor of policies that further reduce barriers to care that bend the arc of our universe away from justice.”
Biden, the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary, said he supports repealing the Hyde Amendment fewer than two days after his campaign said he supported it. The amendment is a provision included in government spending bills that bans federal funding for abortions except in the cases of rape, incest, or when a woman’s pregnancy threatens her life.
Biden has gone back and forth on the issue during the last month. Biden, like several other Democrats running for president, has voted in support of spending bills that contain the Hyde Amendment when he was senator. Then he appeared to tell an American Civil Liberties Union volunteer last month that he no longer supported the ban. On Wednesday, however, he stood in contrast to other Democratic contenders when he said he supported the ban.
Less than two days later, after receiving backlash from other candidates and from pro-abortion groups, he said that “circumstances have changed.”
“If I believe healthcare is a right, as I do, I can no longer support an amendment that makes that right dependent on someone’s ZIP code,” he said.
The Democratic National Committee has called since 2016 to abolish the Hyde Amendment, saying it gets in the way of low-income women having access to abortion. It’s not clear whether this year’s spending bill will get caught up in a battle over Hyde, and Planned Parenthood’s president evaded questions during the C-SPAN interview on whether Democrats should be willing to shut down the government if the ban remains in the final spending bill.
Also, despite Wen’s confidence in Biden’s stance, she wouldn’t say in the interview whether the organization planned to endorse a candidate in the Democratic primary, but she did say Planned Parenthood would endorse during the general election.
“We have so many exceptional candidates that it’s too early for us to say about endorsement, but here is what we will say: That our expectation is that every candidate will stand strongly with us to protect the right to safe, legal abortion access and who will speak with us with one voice that abortion care is healthcare and healthcare is a fundamental human right,” she said.
“We are looking into all options now for endorsements,” she added. “We certainly plan on endorsing in general in 2020.”
