President Joe Biden grabbed a reporter and told him to “get educated” about the limits on abortion that were permitted under Roe v. Wade before it was overturned by the Supreme Court.
His frustration might have been better directed at Democratic candidates.
When asked if he supported any restrictions on abortion, Senate candidate Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D-PA) replied, “I don’t.” Asked whether that was true even in the third trimester of pregnancy, he said, “I believe that choice is between a woman, her doctor, and a god if she prays to one.”
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Katie Hobbs, the Democratic nominee for governor of Arizona, was also asked if she thought there should be any limits to abortion. “The decision about abortion should be between a patient and their doctor,” she said, refusing to commit to any.
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) wouldn’t directly answer whether he supported any abortion restrictions, pointing instead to his Republican opponent’s position on the issue. He has voted for a bill, often described as codifying Roe, that would wipe out most such restrictions already in place at the state and federal levels.
Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams (D-GA) connected abortion and family size, arguing that without resort to elective abortion, inflation would hit women with additional children even harder.
Totally unrestricted abortion with taxpayer funding is no more popular than no-exceptions total abortion bans and is less popular than laws that prohibit the procedure with exceptions between 15 and 20 weeks.
Roe may poll well while the Supreme Court, reversing it does not. But the public does not support abortion at any stage of development right up to birth and generally only favors its legality under certain circumstances. The polling has been consistent on this across decades.
Biden is right to be exasperated. But in some ways, the more extreme Democrats are being more faithful to Roe, and certainly the bills advertised as codifying the 1973 Supreme Court abortion decision, than he is.
Roe was written to acknowledge some compelling state interest in protecting fetal life in the third trimester while essentially mandating abortion on demand in the first two trimesters. But even that was subject to a health exception so broad (defined in the companion case Doe v. Bolton as including “physical, emotional, psychological, familial and the woman’s age” as factors) as to negate most such restrictions.
What Roe seemed to give in terms of tools for legally protecting fetal life before birth, Doe took away.
When Roe was narrowly upheld in 1992’s Casey v. Planned Parenthood ruling, the trimester framework was replaced with a more explicit standard of fetal viability. More abortion restrictions began to pass judicial muster, and more were enacted. But even bans on partial-birth abortion, for which Biden voted as a senator from Delaware, weren’t upheld by the Supreme Court the first time they were challenged.
Biden has argued that Roe and Casey draw the line at viability and so does he. Unlike Roe’s trimester framework, when fetal viability occurs can happen progressively sooner in pregnancy due to advances in medical science. He has backed bans on partial-birth and post-viability abortions over the course of his career, though he also once supported barring taxpayer-funded abortions through the Hyde Amendment too.
Nevertheless, Roe did not unambiguously draw this line, and the federal abortion rights bill the White House and nearly all congressional Democrats supported erases it entirely.
Poll after poll shows majorities saying they support Roe while also favoring abortion restrictions that were at least arguably impermissible as long as it remained in effect. Surveys similarly show majorities saying they want to codify Roe while endorsing restrictions the main Democratic bill in question absolutely would not allow.
The Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe not only allows for greater legal protection of children before birth, but it also allows abortion policy to more closely reflect public opinion and to be made by officials directly accountable to voters in a way the nine justices are not.
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Not for the first time, Biden is trying to rescue the Democratic Party from its extremism on an issue — while seeming totally unaware of how much he has actually embraced it.
