President Joe Biden is relying heavily on abortion to help preserve the Democratic congressional majorities after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade.
Biden was introduced Thursday at a Democratic fundraising reception in New York City by a donor who referred to the midterm elections as “Roe-vember.”
The president didn’t disagree. “There’s a lot up for grabs, a lot at stake, from choice to Social Security to gun rights to global warming to democracy itself,” he said. Biden added that Republicans want “to make sure Roe is forever gone” but that he is “going to be around at least another two years” to veto anti-abortion legislation.
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It’s an odd position for Biden to find himself in, as not only is he the second Catholic president — media reports often describe him as “devout,” especially when making note of his weekly mass attendance — but an erstwhile opponent of legal abortion.
As a freshman senator when Roe was handed down, Biden was initially critical of the 1973 ruling.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far,” he said the following year. “I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1972, the same year George McGovern lost in a 49-state landslide to President Richard Nixon. Washington Post columnist Robert Novak quoted an unnamed senator as saying Democrats were being defined as the party of “acid, amnesty [for Vietnam draft dodgers], and abortion.” (Novak later revealed the senator was Thomas Eagleton, who was for 18 days McGovern’s running mate before being replaced by Sargent Shriver.)
In the same 1974 interview in which Biden criticized Roe, he said, “But when it comes to issues like abortion, amnesty, and acid, I’m about as liberal as your grandmother.” He described himself as a liberal on healthcare and civil rights.
“I’m really quite conservative on most other issues,” Biden added. “My wife said I was the most socially conservative man she had ever known.”
Biden was an early supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which blocked most taxpayer funding of abortion through programs like Medicaid. While named after a Republican congressman from Illinois, it passed in a Democratic-controlled Congress with bipartisan support from Catholic lawmakers like Biden. He continued to support the Hyde Amendment until 2019, when he would have been an outlier in the Democratic presidential field on the issue.
In 1982, Biden voted for a constitutional amendment that would have overturned Roe and allowed abortion policy to be set by the states — much as the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which he has repeatedly denounced, did.
Biden did gradually move leftward on abortion over the years. By the time he first sought his party’s presidential nomination in 1987, Democrats were predominantly pro-abortion rights and committed to appointing Supreme Court justices who would uphold Roe. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that year, Biden helped block the high court nomination of Robert Bork, who believed Roe was wrongly decided.
Nevertheless, Biden continued to vote for some abortion restrictions. He voted more than once to ban partial-birth abortion, including two bills in the 1990s that were vetoed by President Bill Clinton. Biden voted to override both vetoes and backed the 2003 partial-birth abortion ban President George W. Bush signed into law. “I did and I do,” Biden replied on April 29, 2007, when Tim Russert asked him about supporting these laws on NBC’s Meet the Press.
In that interview, Biden explained his evolving position on Roe and abortion. “Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the United States Senate, and I have learned a lot,” he said.
“Look, Tim, I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my — my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility,” Biden continued. “And the decision that I have come to is Roe v. Wade is as close to we’re going to be able to get as a society that incorporates the general lines of debate within Christendom, Judaism, and other faiths, where it basically says there is a sliding scale relating to viability of a fetus.”
By the time the Dobbs opinion leaked, Biden had done a 180 on the issue. “The idea that we’re going to make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child, based on a decision by the Supreme Court, I think, goes way overboard,” he said.
The president now finds himself leading the opposition to Dobbs in the hope the decision will salvage the Democrats’ slender majorities on Capitol Hill. “At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law,” he said in a statement.
Some polling bears out Biden’s political calculation on abortion, especially showing Democrats becoming more energized since Dobbs overturned Roe.
“There are so many fundamental rights that are affected by that, and I’m not prepared to leave that to the whims of the public at the moment,” Biden said of Dobbs’s impact on contraception, same-sex marriage, and other issues, citing a line in Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion but ignoring the arguments made in Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion. The White House has repeated this argument many times.
“But it’s about freedom. It’s not just about choice,” Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser on Wednesday. “It’s not just about choice. Roe was a balance, and it was there for over — almost 50 years. But now, mark my words, they’re going after gay rights, LGBTQ.”
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Still, the Catholic president has made abortion a rallying cry in the midterm campaign, including bans on the procedure in his definition of “MAGA” Republicanism. Biden hit a 15-week ban proposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) as recently as Thursday, claiming it contained “no exceptions — rape, incest — no exceptions.”
“I happen to be a practicing Roman Catholic,” he said. “My church doesn’t even make that argument.”
