Biden’s big abortion lie in his State of the Union address
My mom taught me that saying something you know is not true is a lie. President Joe Biden told some whoppers Thursday night in his State of the Union speech, including several about abortion.
Biden, for example, vowed to “restore Roe v. Wade as the law of the land.” No president, of course, can establish the “law of the land,” let alone reinstate an overturned Supreme Court decision interpreting the Constitution.
Biden was really saying that he would sign into law the so-called Women’s Health Protection Act, which is supported by nearly every Democrat in Congress.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held in 1973 that our written Constitution protects an unwritten right to privacy that, in turn, includes an unwritten right to abortion. The high court created an elaborate set of rules for each trimester of pregnancy to determine which pro-life legislation crossed the line. (Spoiler alert: Those rules aren’t in the Constitution either).
The Supreme Court tried to make sense of the resulting confusion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, a 1992 decision revising Roe and substituting a new set of rules.
It didn’t work. Finally, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the court in 2022 admitted that it never should have jumped into the abortion fray, overruled Roe and Casey, and returned abortion regulation to the American people and their elected representatives.
At the time, Roe represented a more liberal abortion policy than any state, or virtually any other country on Earth, had ever chosen for itself. Still, the Supreme Court left just a smidgeon of room for a few limits on abortion.
The Women’s Health Protection Act would squelch even those meager attempts to protect human beings in the womb.
Democrats’ bill would prohibit any government — federal, state, or local — from taking any action that could, even potentially, reduce the likelihood of abortion.
In fact, the legislation would require all governments everywhere to repeal any pro-life laws, regulations, or policies that might already be on the books.
Nearly three-quarters of the states, for example, have laws requiring either parental consent or notification before a minor may get an abortion. Nationally, 70% of Americans — including 57% of Democrats — favor at least the latter.
The Supreme Court upheld such laws under Roe, but the Women’s Health Protection Act would make requiring any kind of parental involvement impossible.
More than 70% of those surveyed oppose diverting federal tax dollars to support abortion, including a majority of those who identify as “pro-choice.” The Supreme Court repeatedly held that Roe did not require government to subsidize abortion, but the Women’s Health Protection Act would require it.
Most Americans believe that health care workers with religious objections should not be forced to participate in abortion. The Supreme Court has applied the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act to protect the exercise of religion from coercive, pro-abortion government policies. The Democrats’ bill explicitly makes RFRA inapplicable to any situation that involves abortion.
Even when inventing a right to abortion, the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade referred dozens of times to women, mothers, and “unborn children.” In fact, the high court held that the presence of a second human being meant that the so-called right to privacy was not unlimited.
Even the proposed Women’s Health Protection Act, as recently as 2019, used “woman” or “women” nearly three dozen times and stated its purpose as protecting “a woman’s ability to determine whether and when to bear a child.” The current version deletes all but one use of “women” (in the bill title) and now states its purpose as protecting “a person’s ability to determine whether to continue or end a pregnancy.”
The idea that Biden, or those who wrote his speech, knew none of this is laughable. They have read Roe v. Wade and examined the Women’s Health Protection Act. They know that one of those bears almost no resemblance to the other.
They know, therefore, that the Women’s Health Protection Act would not “restore” Roe but would instead impose an even more radical abortion regime on the whole country.
Biden could have been honest about that in his speech Thursday night, but instead chose to lie.
Originally published at The Daily Signal.
Thomas Jipping is deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
