If President Joe Biden is afraid that embracing an abortion up to the moment of birth policy will be politically unpopular, he isn’t doing a good job of convincing voters that he opposes late-term abortion.
This week, Fox News Digital reported that the Biden campaign, through spokeswoman Lauren Hitt, had rebuffed the notion that the president supports legal late-term abortion and that the standard set by the U.S. Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade was the correct one.
“No, the president doesn’t support full-term abortions, as he’s made clear many times,” Hitt said. “He thinks Roe got it right.” The comment was made in a bid to contrast the president with independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who recently said he opposes any limits on abortion.
There is good political reason for Biden to oppose abortion up to the moment of birth. Polling consistently shows that the vast majority of people oppose abortion after 15 weeks, with only a small minority supporting a no-limits policy.
A recent Economist/YouGov poll from February found that 48% of voters would support an abortion ban after 16 weeks, while 36% would oppose it. The same poll also found that only 24% of respondents believed that abortion should be legal at all times, without any restrictions.
But while Roe was the law of the land for 50 years until it was overturned in 2022, few people ever actually understood what this ruling meant. And, as her recent comments proved, Hitt is among those who do not know what the limits of Roe actually are.
As noted by Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, the limits set in Roe v. Wade allowed for the very late-term abortions that Hitt says Biden opposes.
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“Roe had wide open exceptions allowing late term abortion on healthy babies as Biden and his team know full well,” Dannenfelser wrote on X. “And pro-abortion studies show that’s the norm for late term.”
If Biden really does oppose limits on late-term abortion, he should articulate what those are. Instead, he is hiding behind “restoring Roe” and counting on voters’ lack of knowledge about the ruling’s true implications. It’s a dishonest approach that ensures he never actually has to say when abortion should be illegal, but also allows him plausible deniability to the radicals within his party that gleefully support abortion at the latest stages of pregnancy.