On December 14, the Electoral College officially voted to make Joseph R. Biden, Jr. the 46th President of the United States. Biden, who previously served as the first Roman Catholic Vice President of the United States under President Barack Obama, will become the second Roman Catholic president. John F. Kennedy was the first. Biden has, over the years, gradually supported more pro-abortion positions.
Biden once opposed Roe v. Wade
Biden entered the US Senate in 1973, the same month that the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade that women have a fundamental right to abortion. At the time, Biden publicly opposed the decision, saying, “I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far. I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body.”
Biden once opposed taxpayer funding of abortion
Biden was an early supporter of the Hyde Amendment, which bans federal taxpayer funding of elective abortions, including through Medicaid. He also supported a constitutional amendment to allow states to overturn Roe. Then, in 1983, Biden voted against that same constitutional amendment that he had previously supported.
Biden once opposed funding abortions in foreign countries
In 1984, Biden supported the “Mexico City Policy” first put in place under President Reagan, which prohibits federal funding for international organizations that provide abortion referrals and counseling, or which advocate for the decriminalization of abortion in foreign countries. In 1993, President Clinton rescinded this policy, which was reinstated in 2001 under President Bush. President Obama then rescinded the policy again in 2009, and President Trump again reinstated the policy in 2017. Biden is expected to rescind the policy by executive order upon taking office in January of 2021.
In 1994, Biden insisted, “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them.” Throughout the 1990s, Biden consistently favored banning partial-birth abortion and voted in favor of a 2003 federal ban. But in 2007, when the US Supreme Court upheld the federal partial-birth abortion ban in Gonzales v. Carhart, Biden criticized the ruling as “paternalistic.”
Biden’s positions eventually became fully pro-abortion
When running for president in 2008, Biden said on Meet the Press he was “prepared to accept” the Catholic Church’s view that life begins at conception and that he was “still opposed to public funding for abortion.” When asked in the same interview about his changing views on abortion, Biden said, “I was 29 years old when I came to the United States Senate, and I have learned a lot… I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my… religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.” He went on to defend Roe to being “as close to we’re going get” in a pluralistic society of multiple religious faiths to dealing with the moral issue of abortion.
By 2020, Biden had come to support taxpayer-funded abortion and the codification of Roe into law. He also reversed his previous position on the Hyde Amendment. Biden also plans to restore federal funding for Planned Parenthood through Title X’s family planning program, reversing the Trump administration’s rule prohibiting Title X recipients from referring for or providing abortions. This rule change led Planned Parenthood to walk away from $60 million in federal funding, refusing to separate its abortion business fiscally and physically from its other family planning services.
The nation’s largest abortion corporation supported Biden during the 2020 election and is a longtime donor and supporter of his running-mate, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. The former California Attorney General initiated the investigation and eventual prosecution of pro-life undercover journalists David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt after they had exposed Planned Parenthood executives discussing the sale of body parts of aborted children. Harris’ successor, current California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, continued that investigation and prosecution of the pro-life journalists. Last week, Biden announced his nomination of Becerra to serve as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
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