Joe Biden went into the Thursday presidential debate with one ace in the hole: abortion. And somehow, in a fumbling and frail performance, the president managed to blow even that.
In the two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, a decision joined by three justices nominated by Donald Trump, support for abortion has climbed even in red states. Republican strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio have voted in favor of maintaining or even strengthening abortion rights; purple Michigan, a state Biden desperately needs to win, has too. The Biden campaign knows that abortion is a winning issue – that’s why it has dispatched the vice-president, Kamala Harris, on a nationwide, months-long tour to talk about it.
But instead of hammering Trump, whose administration paved the way for Roe’s demise and whose potential return to power could lead to federal abortion restrictions, Biden stumbled to give a single coherent answer about the procedure.
“I supported Roe v Wade, which had three trimesters. First time is between a woman and a doctor. Second time is between the doctor and an extreme situation. And a third time is between the doctor – I mean, it’d be between the woman and the state,” Biden said, according to a CNN transcript of the debate. “The idea that the politicians – that the founders wanted the politicians to be the ones making decisions about women’s health is ridiculous. That’s the last – no politician should be making that decision.”
He continued: “A doctor should be making those decisions. That’s how it should be run. That’s what you’re going to do.”
When the US supreme court first decided Roe in 1973, legalizing abortion nationwide, the justices implemented a kind of sliding scale of abortion rights, on which a patient’s right to an abortion could vary depending on their trimester of pregnancy. This may have been the framework that Biden was referring to, although his articulation of it is not exactly accurate (or possible to follow).
In any case, by the time the supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, federal law around abortion restrictions had changed. “Roe”, which is really more of the popular term for both the original Roe decision and the line of cases that followed, had come to essentially block states from totally banning abortion prior to fetal viability, a benchmark that generally occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy.
By making it sound as though the state and doctors – whom Biden kept referring to using male pronouns – should get to decide whether a woman can have an abortion, Biden abandoned his party’s vigorous and effective attempts to frame abortion as a matter of freedom and rights.
“That was really fumbled,” said Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for more than two decades. Abortion is, she continued, “very easy to communicate on right now, because a majority of the public is pro-choice, majority of voters are pro-choice. It’s very easy. They don’t want politicians involved in this decision at all. That’s the bottom line.”
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Part of Biden’s issue may be that the devout Catholic – who once said he was personally not “big on abortion” – does not have a track record of promoting abortion rights. While he was on the campaign trail in 2020, his reluctance to even say the word “abortion” frustrated abortion rights activists.
Trump, in contrast, stayed disciplined on abortion during the Thursday debate. He repeatedly called it a states’ rights issue and demurred on whether it should be legal in cases of rape, incest or medical emergencies. He glided past the fact that many states with near-total abortion bans do not permit the procedure in cases of rape or incest, and that a supreme court stacked with his justices had just punted on the legal question of whether states can ban abortions in some emergencies.
The former president also avoided mentioning that some anti-abortion activists believe he could use a 151-year-old law to enact a total abortion ban nationwide.
During another exchange, Trump spoke forcefully about how restoring Roe would mean that Biden “can take the life of the baby in the ninth month and even after birth”, as well as “rip the baby out of the womb in the ninth month and kill the baby”. It was language that Trump had deployed during a presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, to the delight of the anti-abortion movement.
These claims are based on myths. Infanticide is obviously illegal. The vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester of pregnancy; those that happen after that point are often due to a medical issue. The abortion rights movement has worked for years to destigmatize these procedures and eradicate the phrase “late-term abortion”, which is not a phrase doctors use.
But Biden couldn’t seem to figure out if he wanted to correct Trump’s falsehoods or confirm them.
“That is simply not true. That Roe v Wade does not provide for that. That’s not the circumstance. Only when the woman’s life is in danger, if she’s going to die – that’s the only circumstance in which that can happen,” he said. “But we are not for late-term abortion, period – period, period.”
There’s little danger that staunchly pro-choice voters will leave Biden, according to Undem, since Democrats are so associated with abortion rights while Republicans are so linked to restrictions. But Biden’s inability to talk about what should be a slam-dunk issue for Democrats may bolster concerns that he’s just not up for a second presidency.
“It was pretty dismal,” Undem said. “It just seemed incoherent, not clear. At one point, he got the message in that politicians shouldn’t be making this decision at all. But it was not great.”
