President Joe Biden on Tuesday reacted to a Supreme Court draft opinion that indicates the reversal of Roe v. Wade — the 50-year precedent guaranteeing a woman's right to an abortion — calling it a potentially "radical decision." 

What You Need To Know

  • President Joe Biden reacted to a Supreme Court draft opinion that indicates the reversal of Roe v. Wade, calling it a potentially "radical decision"

  • The president said the issue at hand is how this violates the right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution

  • Biden, who supports the right to seek an abortion, also said “abortion” for the first time publicly, a word he had never said out loud or used in statements on the issue, a fact criticized by reproductive rights groups

  • In a statement earlier Tuesday, the president called on elected officials “at all levels” to prepare to protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion if that right is indeed extinguished at the federal level, and called on voters to elect more pro-choice lawmakers

“If this decision holds, it’s really quite a radical decision,” he said to reporters at Joint Base Andrews as he prepared to leave for Alabama. “It's a fundamental shift in American jurisprudence.”

Biden spoke in reaction to a draft opinion obtained and published by POLITICO Monday night, which featured a draft ruling authored by Justice Samuel Alito that Roe was “wrong from the start” and must be “overruled.”

The president said the issue at hand is how this violates the right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution. 

“This goes far beyond the concern of whether or not there’s the right to choose. It goes to other basic rights: the right to marry, the right to determine a whole range of things,” he said.

“So the idea that we're going to make a judgment that is going to say that no one can make the judgment to choose to abort a child based on a decision by the Supreme Court — I think goes way overboard,” he later added.

Biden, who supports the right to seek an abortion, also said “abortion” for the first time publicly, a word he had never said out loud and has rarely used in statements on the issue, a fact criticized by reproductive rights groups. He also did not say the word in his State of the Union address in March, as the fight over abortion rights was at one of its most visible moments in history due to the Mississippi case. 

The president also said before boarding Air Force One that he would support codifying Roe as federal law. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said earlier Tuesday that he intended to hold a vote in the Senate to codify abortion rights.

“At the federal level, we will need more pro-choice Senators and a pro-choice majority in the House to adopt legislation that codifies Roe, which I will work to pass and sign into law,” Biden said in an earlier statement on the issue.

In the same statement, he also called on elected officials “at all levels” to prepare to protect a woman’s right to choose an abortion if that right is indeed extinguished at the federal level.

Biden also called on local, state and federal officials to protect the right to seek an abortion if the draft opinion is accurate, and urged voters in November's midterm elections to vote for more pro-choice lawmakers.

“If the Court does overturn Roe, it will fall on our nation’s elected officials at all levels of government to protect a woman’s right to choose,” he said. “And it will fall on voters to elect pro-choice officials this November.”

The president pointed to his administration’s defense of the right to seek an abortion in front of the Supreme Court when they heard the case at hand — whether a Mississippi law banning nearly all abortions after 15 weeks in unconstitutional.

“We said that Roe is based on ‘a long line of precedent recognizing “the Fourteenth Amendment’s concept of personal liberty”… against government interference with intensely personal decisions,’” Biden said.

“I believe that a woman’s right to choose is fundamental, Roe has been the law of the land for almost fifty years, and basic fairness and the stability of our law demand that it not be overturned,” he added.

The president also said in his statement Tuesday that he had already asked his Gender Policy Council and the White House’s legal counsel to prepare “options for an administration response to the continued attack on abortion and reproductive rights” shortly after the Texas governor signed into law a near-total ban on abortions, another law that has reached the Supreme Court.

“We will be ready when any ruling is issued,” he said in the statement Tuesday.

The Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra also released a statement saying that “patients make their own decisions about their bodies,” and outlining what his department has done to further reproductive rights.

That included launching the first agency task force on reproductive healthcare access and issuing a rule to strengthen the Title X family planning program, reversing the Trump administration’s changes to the program.