Could Biden do more about abortion?

A few hours after the ruling by which the US Supreme Court ruled the right to abortion nationally, US President Joe Biden spoke about “A tragic mistake”and pledged to make greater efforts to protect women who intend to terminate pregnancy. However, according to many Democratic politicians, including many on the party’s left wing, Biden’s response has so far been very weak, and may remain so in the future, despite promises to do more.

“Biden’s words were harsh, but I would have appreciated some additional details about the actions that will be taken,” he said. He said for example a Politician MP Pramila Jayapal, who heads the party’s most important left-wing political group, the Progressive Rally. But hope is not limited to the more radical wing. Thirty-four Democratic senators Sign an open letter Where they ask Biden for “courageous decisions”: “You have the power to respond and lead a national response to this terrible decision,” the letter said.

Biden collaborators they pointed out that the president has already promised that he will protect women who will be forced to move to a country other than the one in which they live to have an abortion, and that in recent months with a series of measures facilitated Getting abortion pills across the country.

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For some Democrats, that’s not enough. In an article published on The New York Times , Well-known Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren Effects Some of his older proposals to facilitate access to abortion, including compensating women forced to have abortions in another state with federal funds. Warren also suggested building termination clinics on federal lands, for example within national parks, in order to escape individual state laws.

A White House official said Politician That although the latter idea is “well-intentioned”, it could expose women who intend to abort and the doctors who perform the procedure to significant legal trouble. US law grants a kind of immunity from state law to government employees, but only to them. The official added that the White House has spent the past two months studying possible measures to limit a possible Supreme Court ruling against abortion, hinting that many of the ideas circulating in these hours are not really viable.

Biden aides are adamant on this point, noting that the president’s powers are more limited than one might think: Much health legislation depends on individual states and local courts. About two months ago, before the Supreme Court ruling last Friday, Georgetown University public health expert Lawrence Justin, He had told Al Washington Post That “much of what the Biden administration can do is limited to front-end actions.”

At a news conference a few hours after the ruling, Biden added that abortion would be “on the ballot, in the fall”: a reference to the midterm elections, scheduled for November, in which all seats in the House of Representatives will be held. And renews one-third of those in the Senate. “We need to elect more senators and representatives who will put women’s rights into federal law,” Biden said.

The invitation was not particularly appreciated by the party’s left wing. “We can’t just tell people, ‘You vote and your problems will go away,'” said Congresswoman Cory Bush, for example. “Because they’re telling us they’ve already voted for us.”

Many Democrats on the far left, for example, believe that the party should propose ambitious reforms to protect the right to abortion, regardless of its chances of approval. Those chances are actually very slim, given that to pass most reforms in the Senate, it needs 60 votes and Democrats currently have 50. In this way, they say, the public burden and pressure to reject the law will be a burden for Republicans.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi on Monday He said He is working on some abortion bills, but has not provided any other details.

Some Democrats, like Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have gone further. Asks That Biden increase the number of Supreme Court justices to balance the majority of conservative justices. It’s a power the president already has, but he’s never thought to use in earnest yet: it would, in fact, be a divisive decision that would fundamentally change the American institutional system. For the same reasons, the Democratic leadership has never proposed cutting the number of votes needed to pass more complex reforms to the Senate to 50, as the party’s left wing has been demanding for some time.

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But in recent days, the White House has announced that some federal agencies will soon announce new measures to protect the right to terminate a pregnancy.