Biden once voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying women do not have ‘sole right’ to choose
As a senator, President Biden previously voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, having insisted the Supreme Court went “too far” — and that women do not have “the sole right to say what should happen” to their bodies.
The commander-in-chief was among those this week sternly decrying the leaked draft opinion that suggested the high court was poised to overturn the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
Biden, 79, said Tuesday that it “concerns me a great deal that we’re gonna after 50 years decide a woman does not have a right to choose.”
However, his views were radically different in 1973, when Biden became the youngest member of the Senate at 31 — and just 17 days before the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
“I don’t like the Supreme Court decision on abortion. I think it went too far,” he told the Washingtonian the following year while stressing that he was “really quite conservative on most” issues.
“I don’t think that a woman has the sole right to say what should happen to her body,” he said at the time.
He held the same views a decade later in 1982 when he signed a constitutional amendment that would allow individual states to overturn Roe v. Wade and make their own decisions about abortions, as the current expected ruling would do.
That Human Life Federalism Amendment sought to stress that “a right to abortion is not secured by this Constitution.”
Biden was the only Democrat singled out by the New York Times at the time as supporting the amendment that the National Abortion Rights Action League called “the most devastating attack yet on abortion rights.”
“I’m probably a victim, or a product, however you want to phrase it, of my background,” the Roman Catholic future president said at the time.
The Times said that Biden called it “the single most difficult vote I’ve cast as a US senator.”
However, he was unsure he had “a right to impose” his views on an issue that would affect the nation, the Times noted.
The bill never made it to the full Senate, and Biden later switched positions and voted against it when it came back up a year later, the Times noted — saying such flipping on the key issue “would become a hallmark of his political career.”
By 2012, he was opposed to his own earlier views, saying government doesn’t have “a right to tell other people that women, they can’t control their body,” the report noted.
His new stance may have been an attempt to “carve out a space for himself as the middle, moderate candidate,” Ilyse Hogue, president of abortion rights organization Naral Pro-Choice America, told the Times ahead of Biden’s successful election run.
Tucker Carlson was among those this week highlighting Biden’s radical flip-flopping on abortion as he mocked Democrats for overreacting to the possible end of what is now deemed a “sacred” right.
Carlson insisted that even “ardent pro-choicers” have widely criticized the 1973 ruling, which the Fox News host called “the most embarrassing court decision handed down in the last century.”
‘”And that would include Joe Biden,” he reminded his viewers Tuesday night.
“Joe Biden has always supported legal abortion. But nine years after the Roe decision was handed down, he was still willing to admit it was indefensible as a legal decision,” Carlson told viewers.
“In fact, Biden concluded Roe had gone, quote, ‘too far.’ And of course, it had gone too far. That was obvious then. It’s obvious now,” Carlson insisted.
