When Joe Biden Voted to Let States Overturn Roe v. Wade

When Joe Biden Voted to Let States Overturn Roe v. Wade


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Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 1981. His changing record on abortion is getting fresh scrutiny as he considers running for president in a Democratic primary where women are expected to make up a majority of voters.CreditCreditGeorge Tames/The New York Times



It was a new era in Washington in 1981, and abortion rights activists were terrified. With an anti-abortion president, Ronald Reagan, in power and Republicans controlling the Senate for the first time in decades, social conservatives pushed for a constitutional amendment to allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that had made abortion legal nationwide several years earlier. The amendment — which the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights” — cleared a key hurdle in the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 1982. Support came not only from Republicans but from a 39-year-old, second-term Democrat: Joseph R. Biden Jr. “I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” Mr. Biden, a Roman Catholic, said at the time. The decision, he said, was “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a U.S. senator.”

The bill never made it to the full Senate, and when it came back up the following year, Mr. Biden voted against it. His back-and-forth over abortion would become a hallmark of his political career. As Mr. Biden prepares for the possibility of a third presidential run, women’s rights leaders and activists in both parties are recalling these shifts on abortion, which are likely to draw fresh scrutiny in a Democratic primary race where women are expected to make up a majority of voters. Mr. Biden entered the Senate in 1973 as a 30-year-old practicing Catholic who soon concluded that the Supreme Court went “too far” on abortion rights in the Roe case. He told an interviewer the following year that a woman shouldn’t have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.” By the time he left the vice president’s mansion in early 2017, he was a 74-year-old who argued a far different view: that government doesn’t have “a right to tell other people that women, they can’t control their body,” as he put it in 2012.


Abortion has long been a difficult issue for Catholic Democrats and leaders including former Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York, Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania and Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia. Many Catholic Democrats in government have cited their faith in explaining their personal opposition to abortion while taking stands to support abortion rights — and, in some cases, also holding positions in favor of some abortion restrictions. A Pew Research Center poll last fall showed Catholics divided on whether abortion should be legal. But some of Mr. Biden’s more moderate-to-conservative stances in his legislative record are raising questions in the party about whether he could win over an ascendant liberal wing eager to impose purity tests around issues of race and gender in 2020.

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But the issue of abortion poses particularly challenging terrain for Mr. Biden. Efforts to restrict access to abortion by the Trump administration, and the new conservative majority on the Supreme Court, have heightened concerns among many Democrats that federal protections of abortion rights could be chipped away or eventually overturned — and that the next president needs to be a dependable ally on abortion issues. “Anxiety is super high among women across the country,” said Ilyse Hogue, president of the abortion rights organization Naral Pro-Choice America. “Joe Biden is trying to carve out a space for himself as the middle, moderate candidate, and he’s going to have to really get with the times and understand that standing with abortion rights is the middle, moderate position.” She added, “I can’t tell you if he’s there or not.”

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https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/us/politics/biden-abortion-rights.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage