Pro-life groups condemned the White House after it announced on Friday that President Joe Biden will sign an executive order intended to protect access to abortion.
“Two weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and eliminated a woman’s Constitutional right to choose. This decision expressly took away a right from the American people that it had recognized for nearly 50 years – a woman’s right to make her own reproductive health care decisions, free from government interference,” the White House said Friday. “Fundamental rights – to privacy, autonomy, freedom, and equality – have been denied to millions of women across the country, with grave implications for their health, lives, and wellbeing. This ruling will disproportionately affect women of color, low-income women, and rural women.”
“President Biden has made clear that the only way to secure a woman’s right to choose is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe as federal law. Until then, he has committed to doing everything in his power to defend reproductive rights and protect access to safe and legal abortion,” the White House said.
To that end, Biden will sign an executive order “safeguarding access to reproductive health care services, including abortion and conception.”
A fact sheet released by the White House says Biden will direct Health Secretary Xavier Becerra to take the following actions:
- Protect and expand access to so-called medication abortions — the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol, which when taken in sequence will stop an unborn baby from growing and then cause miscarriage, accompanied by cramping and bleeding.
- Ensure that pregnant women and those experiencing pregnancy loss “have full rights and protections for emergency medical care.”
- Expand access to contraception and ensure that Obamacare coverage guarantees free birth control and contraceptive counseling.
- Promote abortion services through public education efforts “to ensure that Americans have access to reliable and accurate information about their rights and access to care.”
- Convene volunteer lawyers to serve as legal counsel to “patients, providers, and third parties lawfully seeking or offering” abortions.
Additionally, Biden’s executive order will address concerns over patient privacy and digital surveillance, enact protections for mobile abortion clinics that may be deployed at the borders of states that ban or restrict abortion, and create an interagency task force on Reproductive Health Care Access.
Jeanne Mancini, the president of March for Life, said it is “tragic” that the Biden administration is “using its power to push for more and more painful abortions which harm women and take innocent lives.”
“Of particular concern is the administration’s effort to push chemical abortion which carries significant health risks to women, even more than surgical abortion. Our nation today faces significant challenges; not enough abortion is not one of them,” she said, according to CNSNews.
Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America President Marjorie Dannenfelser accused Biden of caving to “abortion extremists.”
“Long gone is the Democratic Party of ‘safe, legal, and rare.’ President Biden has once again caved to the extreme abortion lobby, determined to put the full weight of the federal government behind promoting abortion,” she said.
“Democrats will stop at nothing to promote their agenda of abortion on demand, up until the moment of birth, paid for by the taxpayers – including dangerous mail-order abortion drugs — even if it means gutting the long-standing filibuster, increasing the size of the Supreme Court, or putting abortionists in tents in national parks. We are committed to exposing Democrats’ abortion extremism to voters across key battleground states so this extreme agenda can be soundly rejected at the ballot box this November.”