Around the turn of the 21st century, two men who would be president weighed in on abortion.
“I’m very pro-choice,” then-real estate businessman Donald Trump said in a 1999 interview on “Meet the Press,” attributing his views to “a little bit of a New York background.”
That was the same era when Joe Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware, was squishy on the issue. Also in 1999, Biden voted to express approval for Roe v Wade. But he also, during that period, voted to maintain a rule that prevented American military women from using their own money to get abortions in overseas military hospitals. In 1977, Biden voted against a compromise that would have allowed Medicaid funding of abortions in cases of rape, incest or where the life of the mother was a concern.
Until he was running for president in 2019, he supported the Hyde amendment banning the use of federal funds for abortions.
Fast forward to 2022, and both men have become unlikely heroes for the other side. Trump stood as the pivotal player as the Supreme Court – now one-third Trump appointees – dissolved the 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion.
And Biden, visibly enraged over the ruling, delivered a passionate call to arms, pledging to use his office to help women get abortions if they are in states where it is banned. And he pleaded with voters to help him get a Congress that will codify the right nationwide.
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“Let’s be very clear: The health and lives of women in this nation are now at risk,” Biden said, displaying a mix of anger and sadness as he talked about young girls who would be forced to carry the products of incest and women who would endure the pain of delivering their rapists’ offspring.
The ruling “made the United States an outlier among developed nations in the world,” the president said. But “this decision must not be the final word. My administration will use all appropriate and lawful power” to help women seeking abortion, “but Congress must act. With your vote, you can act,” he added. “You can have the final word. This is not over.”
For many Americans – a strong majority of whom, polling shows, support abortion rights – Friday was like witnessing the expected death of a friend with a terminal illness. People largely knew the ruling was coming, since a leaked opinion laid out the reasoning to discard a right the high court itself established in 1993. But it was a gut punch nonetheless, with demonstrators chanting and weeping outside the black metal barriers protecting the Supreme Court, absorbing the reality of a day they had hoped still might not come.
“It was like a death,” says Sonia Ossorio, president of the National Organization for Women New York.
And it would most likely not have happened had Trump not been elected president in 2016. An unusual type of presidential candidate – he was the first to have neither military nor political experience – Trump used his marketing and branding skills to win over key segments of the GOP base.
A thrice-married former casino owner who bragged in his books about his extramarital affairs, Trump was not a predictable favorite of religious conservatives and evangelicals. But he embraced a strong anti-abortion decision, vowing to appoint like-minded justices to the Supreme Court.
Trump won the white evangelical voter overwhelmingly, with 81% to Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 16% of that vote, according to exit polls, helping to put him over the top in pivotal states.
“They both switched, in a way,” says Barbara Perry, a presidential scholar and Supreme Court expert at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center.
For Biden, it was “an evolution,” she says. A devout Catholic who lost a baby in a car accident, Biden was personally opposed to abortion, a view that was partly reflected in his voting record.
But since then, with changing times and views towards women (not to mention being married to Jill Biden, the first first lady to hold a professional job outside the White House), Biden has become a strong supporter of abortion rights, Perry notes.
For Trump, Perry says, the evolution was transactional.
“He’s just a gross opportunist. He said what he needed to say to get the Republican nomination,” Perry says.
Trump, who continues to hold rallies and dangle the possibility of a 2024 run even as Congress holds damaging hearings on his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection, celebrated the ruling Friday.
“This brings everything back to the states where it has always belonged,” Trump told Fox News. “This is following the Constitution and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago.”
Biden – who was in the Oval Office when the ruling came down and made tweaks to a draft speech prepared in anticipation of the decision – acknowledged in his Friday remarks that there was little he could do to ease the effects of the decision. The president said he would direct the Department of Health and Human Services to make sure “critical medicines” such as the abortion pill are “available to the fullest extent possible.”
The White House also said it would fight any efforts by states to prevent women from traveling to another state to obtain an abortion.
But the reality is, Biden said, that only Congress can vote to codify what was in the now-defunct Roe ruling.
With Biden’s popularity low and midterm trends not favoring the party in power, Democrats are facing loss of control of the House and possibly the Senate this fall. Should that happen, there would be virtually zero chance for congressional action codifying abortion rights. If a Republican were president, abortion rights activists fear that a GOP Congress would ban all abortions, even in states that are now electing to retain access to abortion under the new Supreme Court ruling.
Democrats hope the abortion issue will be a galvanizing issue for dispirited voters who don’t want Republicans in power but might not be motivated to turn out at the polls. On Friday, legions of Democratic candidates declared they would fight for abortion rights if elected.
In the past, foes of abortion have been more effective at turning out their voters, perhaps because abortion rights supporters were complacent in thinking Roe would not be overturned. But the Friday ruling could reverse the momentum, Democratic operatives think.
“Centering abortion access in our messaging ahead of this midterm cycle is critical to mobilizing voters against the pressing threat Republicans pose to both reproductive rights and democracy,” says Danielle Butterfield, executive director of the Democratic SuperPAC Priorities USA. “The threat of Republican extremism has only grown since 2020 and we’ll be reminding voters of exactly that to drive them to the polls.”
Ossorio predicts women will answer Friday’s ruling at the polls in November.
“We’re at the end of our ropes,” after years of bearing the extra family burden from COVID, the baby food shortage and the child care crunch, Ossorio says. “This is a huge galvanizing moment. There isn’t any energy for politeness or stepping aside as we’re ‘supposed’ to do. Women are very focused now.”
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