U.S. President Joe Biden yesterday signed an executive order that is expected to ease access of women to services to terminate pregnancies and then slammed for the umpteenth time, the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v Wade.
What the court did, he said, was an exercise in ‘raw political power’.
Biden, a Democrat, has been under pressure from his own party to take action after the landmark decision last month, which upended roughly 50 years of protections for women’s reproductive rights.
The government’s health department is instructed by Biden’s new directive to increase access to “medication abortion”—pills prescribed to end pregnancies—as well as make sure women have access to emergency medical care, family planning services, and contraception.
Along with doctors, travellers seeking abortions, and mobile clinics for abortions at state boundaries are also mentioned as needing protection.
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But it offered few specifics and promises to have limited impact in practice, since U.S. states can make laws restricting abortion and access to medication.
‘What we’re witnessing wasn’t a constitutional judgment, it was an exercise in raw political power,” Biden told reporters at the White House.
‘We cannot allow an out of control Supreme Court, working in conjunction with extremist elements of the Republican party, to take away freedoms and our personal autonomy.’
The White House is not publicly entertaining the idea of reforming the court itself or expanding the nine-member panel.
Instead, Biden laid out how abortion rights could be codified into law by voters if they elected “two additional pro-choice senators, and a pro-choice House” and urged women to turn out in record numbers to vote. He said he would veto any law passed by Republicans to ban abortion rights nationwide.
Jen Klein, director of the president’s Gender Policy Council at the White House, did not name any specifics when asked what the order would change for women.
‘You can’t solve by executive action what the Supreme Court has done,’ she said.
Still, progressive lawmakers and abortion rights groups welcomed the directive. Senator Elizabeth Warren called it ‘important first steps,’ and asked the administration to explore every available option to protect abortion rights.
The issue may help drive Democrats to the polls in the November midterm elections, when Republicans have a chance of taking control of Congress.
