We knew this would be the case, but at a townhall hosted by NBC this week, Joe Biden just confirmed it:
Former Vice President Joe Biden has said he’ll move to protect abortion rights if the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, the historic decision that protected a woman’s right to have an abortion. The Democratic presidential nominee told an NBC News town hall in Miami on Monday that if the historic ruling on abortion is overturned, his “only response to that is pass legislation making Roe the law of the land. That’s what I would do.”
It was not immediately clear how Biden would achieve this aim. If the Supreme Court finds there is no right to abortion in the U.S. Constitution, any law granting one would be challenged. The nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court has raised concerns that a conservative majority could reverse the 1973 ruling…In 2006, Coney Barrett added her name to a newspaper ad calling for Roe v. Wade to be reversed. The two-page ad was taken out by the St Joseph County Right to Life group in South Bend. Indiana. Barrett and her husband signed the ad, which said life begins at “fertilization,” while she was a law professor at the University of Notre Dame.
One pro-life professor told me some time ago that this has been his fear for a long time: that if Roe is overturned, the Democrats will do everything in their power to enshrine it in statute and set the pro-life movement back decades. The pro-life movement has achieved incredible success over the past several decades by hollowing Roe out, one abortion restriction at a time. The Supreme Court has in most cases permitted this (with Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt being the notable exception), leading many abortion activists to complain that Roe is rapidly becoming more symbolic than anything else.
While it seems a safe bet that Amy Coney Barrett is a solid pro-life vote on the Supreme Court, we still have no idea whether Roe would be overturned by the Roberts Court, even with a 6-3 so-called conservative majority. What we do know is that if Roe is overturned, the battle will just be beginning.
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Check out my conversation with Marjorie Dannenfelser of the Susan B. Anthony List, America’s most influential political pro-life organization, on what’s at stake for the movement in November:
