It’s Long Past Time for the Media to Call Out Biden for Dishonesty on His Abortion Position

Among the most damaging second-order consequences of Roe v. Wade was to distort our abortion politics by allowing Democrats to dodge questions about their specific positions and hide behind a radical status quo.

Even after Roe‘s overturning, pro-choice politicians, to include President Joe Biden, persist in playing this cynical game with the help of the media.

During a townhall event with Nikki Haley earlier this week, CNN’s Jake Tapper made a point of correcting his earlier assertion that Biden did not support any restrictions on abortion after Haley urged Tapper to grill Biden on his position:

Actually Joe Biden, President Biden, last fall was asked would he support any restrictions. His answer was — that he did, and his basic position, President Biden’s, is to codify Roe v. Wade which would mean abortion legal until, what, first 20 — I think it’s 20 weeks of pregnancy. So I was wrong about that and he was asked just to make that note.

Tapper had it right the first time. It is true that in October 2022, Biden responded to a question about whether there should be any limits at all on abortion by affirming that “there should be.” But upon being asked to elaborate, Biden grew frustrated.

“Roe v. Wade, read it, man. You’ll get educated,” replied the commander-in-chief.

Yet Biden’s non-sequitur of an answer would suggest that he himself — the same man who once proposed a constitutional amendment to invalidate Roe — had never so much as skimmed the landmark decision.

Roe itself didn’t impose any restrictions on abortion, only allowing legislatures to pass restrictions around around the arbitrary viability line, the point at which an unborn child could survive outside of the womb, which was then understood to be between 24 and 28 weeks. Later, the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey allowed restrictions to be imposed closer to the 23 or 24 week mark.

So Biden’s formulation — in which support for Roe‘s codification in federal law would equate to support for restrictions on abortion —  only works if you also take Republican support for the decision that overturned Roe last year, which allowed states to set their own abortion policies without exception, to mean that they support radically permissive laws in New York and California.

Does anyone doubt that Biden would object to that logic?

Moreover, Biden has in his capacity as president already thrown the immense power of his office behind a bill that would be notably more permissive than even Roe‘s regime.

The Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022 would have established the viability line as the point before which restrictions could not be imposed, but with a massive loophole: If a single “health care provider” decided that “continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk” to a woman’s “health,” the pregnancy would have to be allowed to have an abortion until birth.

It also would have prohibited parental-consent laws and partial-birth abortion bans, and gutted conscience protections allowed under Roe. Paradoxically given its name, the legislation would have also created a right to ghastly sex-selective abortions that would disproportionately result in the termination of unborn girls.

Far from objecting to these provisions, the Biden White House released a statement of administration policy “strongly” supporting the legislations and insisting that “Congress must further act to protect health care providers’ ability to provide such critical services free from unwarranted and inappropriate restrictions.”

Biden expresses vague opposition to an unqualified right to abortion until birth because to outright state his support for one would be obscene and wildly unpopular. Just 22% of the population and only 12% of independents believe abortion should be available at any point of pregnancy according to one recent poll. In effect, however, that is the policy favored by Biden’s administration, which has not only refrained from supporting, but castigated any kind of attempt to impose federal limits on abortion.

Haley was right. The media has a duty to force Democrats to articulate their positions on abortion, and not to allow them to hide behind an either uneducated or dishonest interpretation of Roe.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.