Biden Vows to Fight Republicans’ Anti-Abortion Push

One year after the United States Supreme Court set aside the constitutional right to abortionPresident Joe Biden promised on Saturday to fight against the “extreme and dangerous” initiative of the republicans for stopping access to the procedure throughout the country.

The resolution of the highest US court to annul the historic decision called “Roe vs. Wade” returned abortion regulation to individual state governments, some of which have since moved to drastically restrict the voluntary termination of pregnancies.

“State bans are just the beginning”, Biden said in a statement on the anniversary of the ruling. “His agenda is extreme, dangerous and out of step with the vast majority of Americans”he stressed.

Some 20 states, mainly in the South and Midwest, have either banned abortion entirely or severely restricted access to the procedure, while others, especially along coastal strips, have moved to protect that right.

The closure of abortion clinics in about a dozen states forced tens of thousands of women to travel to other states to terminate unwanted pregnancies.

Biden warned that Republicans were working to enact a nationwide abortion ban.

“Republicans in Congress want to ban abortion nationwide, but go further, by taking FDA-approved drugs to terminate a pregnancy off the market, and making it harder to get contraceptives,” Biden said when referring to the authorizations registered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)), federal body in charge of these matters.

With a divided US Congress, there is little the president can do on this issue. Still, Biden said he would push for whatever protections at the federal level are available to him.

“My administration will continue to protect access to reproductive health care and will ask Congress to restore the ‘Roe v Wade’ protections into federal law once and for all,” said.

key election issue

Abortion turned out to be a key issue in the 2022 midterm elections and is likely to be just as important in the 2024 presidential race, in which Biden intends to run for re-election.

In a small mobilization in Washington, protesters carried banners and T-shirts with phrases such as “I am the generation after Roe” and “The lives of the unborn matter”urging that abortion restrictions be established at the national level.

Steve Karlen, an anti-abortion activist, and his wife, Laura, traveled to the capital from the state of Wisconsin (central west) to “celebrate” the reversal of the historic ruling, which also coincided with their wedding anniversary.

“It is a blessing that the abortion decision is once again the responsibility of the states,” said Laura, a stay-at-home mother of five. “But ultimately what we want is for unborn children to be protected (nationally), for everyone in our country to have the right to live.”he highlighted.

The issue of abortion has also become an element that animates the primary campaigns of the Republican Party ahead of the 2024 elections. The candidates are currently trying to overcome former President Donald Trump (2017-2021), current favorite for the nomination of that force, who has been criticized for changing his position on the matter.

Speaking in Washington on Friday, the governor of the state of Florida (southeast), Ron DeSantis, praised the ban on abortion with six weeks of gestation that he enacted in his state and that Trump considered very strict: “It was the right thing to do, don’t let anyone tell you it wasn’t”DeSantis said at an event.

According to a recent joint CBS/YouGov survey, 63% of Americans say they are against a national ban on abortion.

Several other demonstrations and events are scheduled for Saturday across the United States, some organized by pro-abortion activists and others by anti-abortion groups.

Source: AFP